Experience

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There is a great deal of informative stuff in Experience as well, and much of it is cleverly presented.

Certainly to make a point - and he's doing that; and also vanity - and there's some of that too, carefully covered with humour; and sometimes to correct an impression they feel is false - and that's an important reason here. Against the backcloth of 50 years of English literary landscape, the raw materials - neurotic, outrageous genius of a father; gorgeous earth-mother Hilly; sophisticated step-mother Elizabeth Jane Howard; stunning girlfriends dropped along the way like a shattering string of pearls; an unknown daughter emerging at 18 - are unbeatable, and Amis makes of them a loving, perceptive, comic portrait. Some of the footnotes are interesting, funny, relevant, but is there any reason at all they couldn't have been included in the text? Sono le parole di Kingsley Amis, il padre scrittore dell’ormai più celebre Martin, parole che possiamo citare a esergo di questa splendida autobiografia.If the trick is to work, the unreliable narrator must in fact be very reliable indeed: reliably partial, reliably unaware of his own egotism. A third of the way through, I thought it would be one of my favourite recent reads; two-thirds of the way through, I'd run out of steam and had to take a break. In fact, Martin handles these scenes particularly well, but there is just too little information for those who aren't in the know. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

As the Chevrolet Celebrity moved boldly down Route 6, I was pretty confident that the evening would go well. I found this totally boring but probably just don't know who enough of the semi-famous people involved are for it to be juicy. The narrative is notable for elaborate and complex time-shifts back and forth across the author's life, setting up echoes and parallels between incidents, playing variations on the themes of love and death, fathers and sons, innocence and experience.There is also a fair amount about the "betrayal" by "the Biographer" (Kingsley's appointed biographer, Eric Jacobs), culminating in an appendix discussing what Martin and other Amiss apparently took very amiss, the writing and eventual publication of some material about recently departed Kingsley.