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Martin Amis: 'I Don't Want to Tread Carefully' | Books | the Guardian Mobile site Sign in Register Text larger · smaller About Us Today's paper Zeitgeist Search Books Search News Sport Comment Culture Business Money Life & style Travel Environment TV Video Community Blogs Jobs Culture Books Martin Amis Martin Amis: 'I don't want to tread carefully' (50) As his 12th novel, The Pregnant Widow, comes out, he admits he Tweet this (43) fears his decline as a writer and is still wounded by the critics Stephen Moss The Guardian, Monday 1 February 2010 Article history larger | smaller Books Martin Amis · Kingsley Amis Culture More interviews More features Martin Amis on euthanasia Video: Controversial author Martin Amis talks about his views on euthanasia at Guardian book club 28 comments Did I say that? Martin Martin Amis joins John Mullan at the Guardian book club to talk about his novel from Amis in his own words 1991, Time's Arrow Link to this video The novelist, 60, in his own words On Books Martin Amis is the most argued over novelist in the UK, largely, I suspect, Review: The Pregnant Most viewed Zeitgeist Latest because hardly anyone reads him. I bumped into my neighbour, a Widow cultured fellow, a few days after interviewing Amis and asked him what he Martin Amis goes back Last 24 hours to first principles, with thought of his work. He had read one of his books years ago – couldn't impressive results, 1. AS Byatt: 'I don't remember what, didn't like it – but he'd heard all about the row, running says Tim Adams believe in God. I 35 comments believe in Wallace hotly last week, sparked by Amis's suggestion that the "silver tsunami" of Stevens' decrepit and deranged old people should be killed off. Thus does Amis News: Whitbread the controversialist obscure Amis the writer, who is now 60 and this week winner condemns publishes his 12th novel, The Pregnant Widow. Martin Amis call for 2. Ayn Rand fan spells out appreciation in world's euthanasia booths largest book ad The Pregnant Widow Amis lives in a large, but not ostentatious, News: Joan Brady 3. Alexander the Great novel gets bum rap in by Martin Amis house in a writerly part of north London, which accuses author of Canada 'prostitution just to flog he shares with his wife, the writer Isabel a book' 4. Guantánamo Bay library's most wanted Fonseca, and young daughters Fernanda and books? Anything but Barack Obama Clio. His father, Kingsley, once had a house – More on Martin Amis Martin Amis shared, at the alcohol-fuelled end of his life, 5. Truce called in battle over ebook rights with his first wife (Amis's mother), the saintly More most viewed Hilly, and her third husband, the late Lord Related Kilmarnock – in the same street. 3 Apr 2010 When I arrive, Amis has a glass of lager in his Great dynasties of the world: The Day-Lewises hand and gets one for me, too. The Guardian Books on Twitter photographer is just setting up, and I'm 23 Nov 2008 Latest news, views and links from the Guardian's surprised by his coldness towards her: maybe Review: Everyday books team Drinking by Kingsley Buy it from the he has been photographed too many times. All Amis Guardian bookshop Sarah_Crown: RT @parisreview "At night converted by Web2PDFConvert.com Guardian bookshop Sarah_Crown: RT @parisreview "At night he asks – their non-relationship is over in a you dream six dreams. But ARE they six flash – is that she doesn't photograph him 12 Jul 2008 Search the Guardian The digested classic: dreams?" - Philip Roth's Paris Review bookshop leaning backwards as that makes him look Lucky Jim by Kingsley interview http://tpr.ly/dkPrPB #books pompous. To me he is charming, politely Amis about 8 hours, 44 minutes ago passing over my misunderstandings of his new Sarah_Crown: Couldn't agree more RT 10 Nov 2002 Search book. @brenstrong "This is the night mail" - WH Observer review: Auden youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuK … Slipstream by Elizabeth feckin' great #books He drawls and tends to talk in fragments, Jane Howard about 10 hours, 11 minutes ago chunks of thought; he describes the hoopla that surrounds publishing a Sarah_Crown: RTing for users of the book as "epiphenomena". What are we to make of his nightmare vision of #books site: early c20th Russia in colour: the "silver tsunami"? "There'll be a population of demented very old amazing (via @andydickson, people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the @catherineshoard) http://bit.ly/b9YfGl restaurants and cafes and shops," he said last week. His solution? about 1 day, 8 hours ago "There should be a [euthanasia] booth on every street corner where you • Find more tweets from our books team could get a Martini and a medal." You can now, on Google, find 137,000 • Follow our books team on a Twitter list items referencing Amis + euthanasia. Yet it was, he admitted as the storm gathered force, "satirical". Amis is at heart, as he readily admits, a comic novelist, and he is something of a comic controversialist. "It's the way these things are picked up," he says when I chide him for provoking the sort of media This week's bestsellers storm which he spent the 90s – when the state of his teeth and his falling 1. American Caesars out with former friend Julian Barnes were the principal literary talking by Nigel Hamilton points – berating. "You never get the context. But I don't want to tread £25.00 carefully and be editing myself. It wasn't an attack on the old – I'm not that far from it myself – and I was skating over the legal complexities, but I stick by my basic point: you need to have a means to end your life." Read the description in his memoir Experience of Kingsley's final years, 2. It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn £16.99 and you will understand Amis's dread. He recalls his intellectually annihilated father sitting at his typewriter, typing the word "seagulls", over 3. Red Men by John Williams £16.99 and over. He fears his own decline as a writer. "I've talked to Ian McEwan about this. Our fallback position is going to be that you write short stuff." 4. Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson £18.99 Amis began The Pregnant Widow soon after publication of the critically 5. Flavour Thesaurus mauled novel Yellow Dog in 2003. He saw the new book as a big one and by Niki Segnit £18.99 described it as "blindingly auto- biographical". "The novel was an awful struggle," he says. "I struggled with it for four years. The first 100 pages seemed all right, they seemed to work, but it was only working because Search the Guardian bookshop of novelistic contrivance, not because it was my story. I realised the Search Easter before last – in Uruguay [Fonseca is half-Uruguayan], where we were on holiday – that it wasn't working. I read on and I thought this is completely dead, it's inert. I had a terrible couple of weeks, then tiptoed back to it and realised it was two books." Latest reviews He set about separating them. Here, he has written a book with a great On Deception by Harry deal of sex (or at least conspiring to have sex) and a little literature; the Houdini second book – still several years away and to be preceded by a short, Electric Eden: satirical novel called State of England – will have a lot of literature and a Unearthing Britain's little sex. Sex and literature, it is fair to say, have been Amis's key Encounter: Essays by Visionary Music by Rob interests, though the order of importance has fluctuated over the years. Milan Kundera Young Milan Kundera's exhumed essays cast a Human Chain by He claims to have taken most of the autobiography out of The Pregnant Seamus Heaney Widow, but will anyone believe him? Private Eye certainly doesn't. In a spell with their insights into creativity, writes John L Williams: Miss wickedly funny spoof in the current issue, it identifies the central Geoff Dyer character Keith with Mart, and for good measure hopes that one day he Shirley Bassey might write a novel that is vaguely plausible. Meanwhile, the Telegraph More books reviews has gone in search of Gloria Beautyman, the sexually voracious woman with "pincers of bliss" who traumatises Keith in the shared bathroom of the Italian castle in which his characters spend a steamy summer in Bestsellers from the Guardian shop 1970. The paper offers a string of early Amis girlfriends as contenders, including Tina Brown, Emma Soames, Julie Kavanagh and Angela Tutti Frutti All six episodes of the Gorgas. Amis rejects such literalism. "That's the crudest way to read 1987 BBC comedy these things, but I invited it by saying the book was going to be blindingly drama series penned by autobiographical. Born in 1949, five foot six and a half, but that's it: I've John Byrne. 2 disc DVD just given Keith my height and my birthday. And my sister." set only £14.99 saving £10. His sister being Sally, an alcoholic who died in 2000 at the age of 46, and From: £14.99 who was, in a brutal phrase Amis applied to her last year, "pathologically Visit the Guardian reader offers shop promiscuous". In The Pregnant Widow, she is reborn as Keith's younger Green & ethical shopping at Guardian ecostore sister Violet: damaged, habitually drinking, forever in hopeless, violent relationships.
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