Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Amis


It looks like Martin Amis's new novel is out--I previously discussed it here--though the slackers at Amazon haven't sent me my copy yet. So I open the Times this morning and a shiver runs down my spine, and not only because it's about negative 12 degrees here. (I'm exagerating a little here--artisitic license, etc.--but, seriously, it must be 50 degrees colder than it was on Saturday. WTF?) Anyway, Michiko Kakutani is reviewing Amis--this cannot be good. She hates everything. She shredded the new Pynchon--which is brilliant--into a heap of ribbons.

Quell surprise! She loves it.

After his embarrassing 2003 novel, “Yellow Dog” — a book that read like a parody of a Martin Amis novel, featuring gratuitous wordplay and a willfully perverse fascination with the seamy side of modern life — the author has produced what is arguably his most powerful book yet: a novel that subjugates his penchant for postmodern pyrotechnics to the demands of the story at hand, a novel that takes all the knowledge he accumulated in the course of researching “Koba” and transforms it, imaginatively, into the deeply moving story of two brothers who were interned at a slave labor camp in the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union. It is a story about fraternal love and resentment, but more important, it is a story about the emotional consequences of survival, about the connection between public and private betrayals and the human costs of a totalitarian state’s policies of internment.


I agree with most of this. She's right about "Yellow Dog." It was appallingly bad. However, I rather liked "Koba" more than the rest of the world, mainly because some twisted part of my soul enjoys reading about totalitarianism. But then tastes will differ, no?

Posted by jwb at 8:30 AM   

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