British Author Martin Amis Dead At 73: Rebuked Stalin To Dismay Of Anglican Literary Set

"I think the world sort of divides up into those who like revolutions and those who don't." Martin Amis

The Guardian, on Amis, here.

Can Anybody Be A Writer? Interview here.

(Kind of an unbearable interview.)

The book of his I loved was this one:

Masterpiece

Leonard Lopate: It’s obvious why Olga would write about Russia and the Soviet legacy, but what led you to write “House of Meetings” and “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.”

Martin Amis: Well, to begin, I think I got interested in it because my father [Kingsley Amis] used to be a Communist.

Lopate: You’d never know that from reading “Lucky Jim.”

Amis: No, but he was sort of over it by then, but not quite. He left the Party after Hungary in ’56.

He said you could always tell the real bastards if they joined the Communist Party after 1956. But I think I was fascinated by this obvious red herring or fool’s errand: the utopia. It astounds me (a) that anyone believes in its possible realization, and (b) that anyone would want to live in a utopia. And all the literary utopias are repulsive places and authoritarian and brutally selective as regards to the arts and so on. So I wondered: Are there divisions between people? Everyone is fond of saying you divide up—Nabokov said: either you sleep well or you don’t, and that’s the biggest division between humankind.

Lopate: Kurosawa said in the title of one of his great films, “The bad sleep well.”

Amis: Well, Nabokov was a champion insomniac and he has a lovely line in a late novella: “night is always a giant, but this one was especially terrible.” I think the world sort of divides up into those who like revolutions and those who don’t.

—The New Yorker

Rest In Peace Martin Amis.