La storia da dentro

Notes on first reading. Not a review. 1. Inside Story is a big voluble book. It’s story is a mashup of autobiography, tributes to absent friends, historical commentary, writing workshop, geopolitics, literary criticism, and commonplace book. It’s highly opinionated. I also think it’s very wise. It’s a Leggi tutto

This book is about a life, my own, so it won't read like a novel – more like a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours. Ideally I'd like Inside Story to be read in fitful bursts, with plenty of skipping and doubling back – and of course frequent breaks and breathers. My heart goe Leggi tutto

This was a hard book to get through: I 'zipped' (relatively speaking, as Pynchon's character 'Slow' Lerner was named after yers truly) through the first half, more or less, but the mounting death toll proved to be spiritual body blows or something for me just as I coincidentally entered the seasonal Leggi tutto

I don’t know what makes Inside Story a “novel” because it reads like what I’m fairly sure it is: a memoir. Maybe because, at times, Martin Amis adopts novelistic devices like third person perspective or because he was covering himself in relating the numerous conversations from decades past and wasn Leggi tutto

The super Hitch e Piccolo Keith Quando Martin Amis parla di sé è irresistibilmente divertente, perchè strapazza il suo ego come se fosse il suo peggiore nemico: si dipinge completamente succube del genere femminile, di tutte le decine di fidanzatine e amanti e mogli ma soprattutto di Phoebe Phelps, c Leggi tutto

There are enormous pleasures on offer here. The book is characteristically forceful, erudite, magisterial, and biting. It's also, perhaps slightly less characteristically for Amis, tender, self-questioning and sentimental. There's much here to please an Amis fan, but hardly anything that would *make Leggi tutto