NEW DELHI, May 21 (IANS) A day after The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s film based on a novel by Martin Amis received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. age 73.
Known for his caricatures of what he considered the absurdity of the “late capitalist” Western society, Martin Amis succumbed to esophageal cancer at his home in Florida, reports the BBC, citing the “New York Times”.
Coming from the literary nobility—his father was the famous novelist, Sir Kingsley “Lucky Jim” Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard was his stepmother—Amis was hailed by TheTimes as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 for which he is best known. for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989), and for his memoirs Experience (2000).
The Guardian called Amis “an influential author of era-defining novels” and noted that he was “among the group of celebrated novelists, including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose work defined the British literary landscape of the 1980s”.
Paying his tribute to Amis, Rushdie told The New Yorker, “He used to say what he wanted to do was leave a shelf of books behind—so he could say, ‘From here to here, it’s me.'” His voice is muted now. He will be sorely missed by his friends. But we have the shelf.”
Nobel laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro told the BBC: “He was the standard-bearer for my generation of novelists and an inspiration to me personally. For all the sting of his satire, the brilliant bravado of his prose, there was always something tender not far from the surface, a yearning For love and connection. His work will continue, overcoming various shifts of fashion and mores.”
Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, according to the Guardian newspaper, and was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and the United States, before attending Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with honors in English.
He paid tribute to his stepmother, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who introduced him to literature with Jane Austen at a time when all picture books were comic books. “She gave me a reading list and an hour later, I went and knocked on the door of her study and said, ‘I should know: Is Elizabeth Darcy getting married?'” Ames recalled.
His first novel, The Rachel Papers, written for The Guardian, was published in 1973 while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. She won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974.
The dark comedy “Dead Babies” was released the following year. He worked as literary editor for the New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, during which time he published his third novel, Success.
The Guardian notes that Amis is often compared to his father, who won the Booker Prize in 1986 for his novel The Old Devils. Although the younger Amis has never won a Booker Prize himself, he was shortlisted for his 1991 novel “Time’s Arrow,” a portrait of a Nazi war criminal told in reverse chronological order, and longlisted in 2003 for his novel “Yellow Dog.”
– Jans
SR /
