Customer Reviews

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Moderately amusing collection of 33 articles culled from various magazines and newspapers. Many of these are interviews with authors like John Updike, Salman Rushdie, and other such literary luminaries. While these are likely of interest to the well-read, I found the more entertaining essays to be the non-interviews. In this vein are those railing on Republican politics, the darts scene, judging a short story competition, the Frankfurt Book Fair, an English soccer team's tour of China, and playing pool with a good friend. The essays are all fairly short, so it's a good book to pick up and put down constantly.

a neat rebuttal to the argument that journalism is prose that's only meant to be read once, this book demands frequent consultation. i spent a lot of it wondering how typical Amis is of his generation. by his late twenties, he's on amicable terms with sex, drugs and rock and roll, but is still mildly scandalised by naked sunbathing and 'too old' to enjoy a Rolling Stones concert (which is wittily trashed). in a postscript, we find that an older Amis isn't bothered by naked sunbathing, so something's changed there then. he's very worried about nuclear weapons and seems to spend a lot of time morbidly brooding over them. later generations barely give them a thought, i think - or maybe they are a constant presence in the subconscious mind, underpinning the pessimism of the age. he's in touch with his macho feelings - the flush of the poker victory and the snooker conquest - in touch with them enough to amusingly undermine them. for Amis, winning at sport matters, but not so much that he doesn't have time to acknowledge his own (relative) [awkwardness] at sport - check out some of those 'live at the Crucible' break totals. interviews with other writers always contain a refreshingly large concentration on the writer's work - in contrast to the spirit of the age, for Amis, it's the writer's work that matters, not his private life. overall, Amis's cool, observant voice drags journalism out of skim-reading terrain and into the realm of serious thought. anyone who enjoys intelligent, urbane, amusing conversation will enjoy this book.

If you are a young and struggling writer and you want to learn how to be "deep" without coming as pretentious (really the only challenge offered by postmodernism), read these charming, effortless and brilliant essays. Amis redefines the word "wit" for a tired era.

This is another collection of occasional articles, a follow up to - The Moronic Inferno.

This also consists of reviews and interviews of the famous and not so famous. There are also a couple of travel pieces thrown in as well.

This collection does not have the consistency of the previous one and some of it has a " scraping the bottom of the filing cabinet " feel. As in - Cannes - where he rambles on about topless beaches, he even apologises in a new preface for the standard of the article.

Most unforgivable of all he does a very disparaging review of a Rolling Stones concert. This is a mortal sin.

When he is good Amis is excellent as in - Chess: Kasporov v Karpov - on the world of chess. I found out it that cheating has been rampant in chess for hundreds of years, not out and out stealing of pieces, but very heavy gamesmanship, fascinating stuff.

This is still worth the read but not as good as other articles that he has put together, but not a bad Sunday filler.

I was looking forward to delving into this book, long time fan as I am of Amis's fiction, but aside from a few essays such as a magesterial, witty and humane portrait of Philip Larkin - a longime friend of Kingsley Amis, which perfectly captures the gallows humour of Larkin's life and lines: 'Give me your arm, old toad, Help me down Cemetery Road', I found this was a rather dated voice from the past.

Amis's prose style and voice is always highly ironic, archly intelligent. And though he tries to put on the swagger of the American hard-baller stylists he so admires, that annoying English middle classness keeps tripping him up (for example when he plays poker with David Mamet he admits to feeling intimidated, he is perturbed by the sight of topless sunbathing in Cannes) and his snooker sessions with fellow novelist Julian Barnes have more than the whiff of overgrown two little boys with two little toys about it as he describes their snooker cues, brought for them by their respective wives.

The problem with Amis's style is that the world has moved on since the 1980s, and Amis's voice has not proven timeless. I think it has something to do with the fact that then it was still just about possible to write about the baseness of many aspects of Western Culture with the ironists voice, knowing you were addressing a knowing and highly educated readership.

Now that luxury cannot be had by writers, and some contemporary journo/novelist combos such as Will Self have realised this (though many of them haven't). No longer can an accepted bed of cultural knowledge be assumed, nor can one assume that the individual conscience of the writer is particularly privileged (something to which Amis still holds fast, witness his recent collection of articles 'The Second Plane'). The way for this type of writer - the cultural commentator, rather than the diagnostician - to survive now, I reckon, is to make like Will Self and be a brisk hack like creature, with a clever knowing style that does not come across too manufactured with sillicone injected metaphors like Amis's style. The spoken word is vital too now, in order to rack up the book sales now, and even literary writers (especially literary writers?) have to busk their comedy to reach an audience, rather than painstakingly craft pieces of journalism which - like many in this collection -can easily end up beached when the tide goes out.