Martin's Muse

There’s something oddly daunting about my face. It’s angular, yet delicate; thin long nose, wide thin mouth – and the eyes: richly lashed, dark ochre with a twinkle of singed auburn…

Martin Amis talks about his muse in The Telegraph. His former close friend Rob Henderson, who died seven years ago, has shown up as Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers (his character described above) and as Gregory Riding in Success and Amis describes him as a catalyst for his new novel The Pregnant Widow, due out early next year. Ex-girlfriend, Julie Kavanagh lifts the lid on her relationship with Amis in a fascinating piece called The Martin Papers in The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine.

Amis the Gynocrat, Adichie the Arrogant

A couple of nice author stories from The Independent today. Martin Amis describes himself as a "gynocrat" in an interview with Christina Patterson, and says he believes that the world would be better run by women. His new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is about the sexual revolution, and is due out in September Her teacher once wrote of her "She is stubborn, arrogant, she has no respect," but Chinua Achebe calls her is "a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new collection of stories out, set between Nigeria and America called The Thing Around Your Neck. (You can read the title story over at Prospect Magazine.)

Amis' Serious Money

Author Martin Amis (who coincidentally wrote a novel called Money) :

... is earning close to £3,000-an-hour in his role as a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester

according to Arifa Akbar in The Independent.

The Manchester Evening News discovered that :

... he is committed to working for 28 hours a year in this role, outside of his writing and research duties as a professor. This work earns him a salary of £80,000 ...

Craig Brown in The Telegraph wonders if it really is all that much compared with what other are earning.

The Satisfaction of Finishing a Book

KayKay forwarded a really nice piece from John Connolly's blog about the satisfaction of finishing a book. His thoughts after finishing and enjoying Wilbur Smith's River God:

I ... felt a degree of satisfaction as I closed the book and put it to one side. There, I thought: another book read, and a lengthy one at that. For a moment, I was one step closer to reading every book in my house, albeit a step forwards that would soon be nullified. River God will probably go to my local Oxfam shop, and there is now a space where it once sat on my bookshelves, a space that can be occupied by a new book as soon as I find the time to amble into one of my native city's many bookstores.

Alas, it is a satisfaction I'm very far from feeling this week. I've never been so part way through so many books.

Believe it or not I'm still reading my first book from the TBR Challenge Martin Amis' Money, but I'm well past half way which is not bad.

I bought the book because I thought I oughta. Had heard stories of Amis being obnoxious and his protagonist is obsessed with ... yes, filthy lucre, and you can't get more crass than that.

Didn't expect to be laughing myself stupid so often, delighting in the bad-boy voice (Amir Hafizi has to read this! making a mental note to pass him my scrunched up pizza-decorated copy when I buy a shiny new one), the dialogue, and the craft of every sentence.

The book is set during the Summer of the Charles and Di wedding and the riots which swept the country. The novel captures the early 80's and Thatcher's Britain so well.

It isn't my first Amis, because I read Time's Arrow years back. That's a bit of clever writing, a whole novel told in reverse chronological order from the protagonist's death to his birth. (Try imagining eating backwards for e.g. ... but that's not the worst). Just like a movie being rewound.

I've got to read The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy because Kaykay said so.

Okay then, it's our book club choice and the meeting is next week. Crime fiction so isn't my thing. And this is very much a sweat soaked testosterone drenched bloke book. But it is very well written and I'm not a quitter. So.

I'm also trying to read Yang-May Ooi's Mind Game before Saturday and the Breakfast for Litbloggers thing at MPH and then the readings at Seksan's.

Thrillers aren't my thing either. When I was in Nigeria I overdosed on them because they were the only books available, thanks to my neighbour.

Anyway, am finding Yang-May's novel (which I managed to borrow from my friend Soo Choon) an intriguing read. I appreciate the contemporary Malaysian setting, and find the Asian Values Alliance, bent on world domination, most sinister. And I like that its an unashamedly lesbian love-story!

Have started reading Camilla Gibbs Sweetness in the Belly as I will be interviewing the author when she comes for the KL Literary Festival at the end of March so this is homework, but nice homework as I am enjoying its African setting.

So a lot of books hanging halfway ...

Oh yes, I did finish one book, Richard Posners Little Book of Plagiarism. A legal mind tackles who did and who did not plagiarise in literary history. (Shakespeare gets off the hook you'll be pleased to know!) and just what constitutes plagiarism in the legal context. It's an extremely readable guide, fascinating for litbuffs and invaluable for academics.

One little quote I'll leave you with:

The reader has to care about being deceived about authorial identity in order for deceit to cross the line to fraud and thus constitute plagiarism.

That's right. The ball is in the reader's court.

And talking of readers, what have you finished, and what have you not?

Arse-Scratching Amis A Non-Acerbic Tutor?

Martin Amis, long dubbed 'the bad boy of British fiction' is to take up a post teaching creative writing at Manchester University reports Alexandar Topping in the Guardian. He promises not to be unkind to his students:

I may be acerbic in how I write but I'm not how I live. And I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to people in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them. One of the things I've learned about fiction - you really do lay yourself open in a way that no other so-called creative artist does. Most other art you're just exhibiting a particular talent, even poetry up to a point, but by writing fiction you expose not only your talent but your whole being, your social, sexual and psychological being and you're never more vulnerable than when you do that, and I'm well aware of that fact and will take it into account.

And he has this to say about the so-called glamour of being a writer:

Well, it is a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study and there is absolutely no way round that.

Update

More Martin Amis in the Sunday Times and you can listen to him talk about his latest book The House of Meetings on WYNC.

Pic nicked from the Guardian.

Walk-On Part

I was just sitting there, not stirring, not even breathing, like the pub's pet reptile, when who should sit down opposite me but Martin Amis, the writer. He had a glass of wine, and a cigarette - also a book, a paperback. It looked quite serious. So did he, in a way. small, compact, wears his rug fairly long ...

I was feeling friendly, as I say, so I yawned, sipped my drink and whispered 'Sold a million yet?'
He looked up at me with a flash of paranoia, unusual in its candour, its bluntness. I don't blame him really, in this pub. It's full of turks, nutters, martians. The foreigners around here. I know they don't speak English - okay, but do they even speak Earthling? They speak stereo, radio crackle, interference. They speak sonar, bat-chirrup, pterodactylese, fish-purr.
'Sorry,' he said.
'Sold a million yet?"
He relaxed. His off-centre smile refused to own up to something.
'Be serious,' he said.
'What you sell then?'
'Oh, a reasonable amount.'
I burped and shrugged. I burped again. 'Fuck,' I said 'Pardon me.' I yawned, I stared around the pub. He returned to his book.
'Hey,' I said 'Every day, do you ...Do you sort of do it every day, writing? Do you set yourself a time and stuff?'
'No.'
'I wish I could stop fucking burping,' I said. He started reading again.
'Hey,' I said 'When you, do you sort of make it up, or is it just, you know, like what happens?'
'Neither.'
'Autobigraphical,' I said. 'I haven't read any of your books. There's, I don't really get that much time for reading.'
'Fancy,' he said. He started reading again.
'Hey,' I said, 'Your dad's a writer too, isn't he? Bet that made it easier.'
'Oh sure. it's just like taking over the family pub.'
'Uh?'

I love the way Martin Amis gives himself a cameo role in Money, and uses it to such comical effect. (His dad, of course was Kingsley Amis). Auster is another author who walks into his own novels. Can you think of any others? I must have a go at fictionalising myself ... a nice writing exercise.

I have been meaning to read Money (also sometimes subtitled A Suicide Note) for years and finally bought a copy a few months ago.

In case you're wondering how this highly acclaimed and best-selling novel slipped past me ... well in 1984 when the book was published, I was living in a small town in Malaysia and didn't hear the buzz about it. The bookshops in KL (Berita, Times, Guardian Pharmacy) carried such a limited range of best-sellers. I missed so much good stuff and now have to go back and fill in the gaps. (The TBR Challenge is very useful!)

But progress is slow. Because a) It's the sort of book where you want to read each sentence carefully to enjoy the style - I love the voice, the energy and the poetry of the writing, and b) it is my "bag book" i.e. I am not allowed to read it at home ... just in cafes, on the LRT and during moments when "real life" is Dullsville. (Yesterday I was at Immigration getting my yearly stamp, and read a fair whack.)

At home, I have to get on and read the stuff I need to read ... for reviews, interviews, blurbing, editing and proofreading. And these are also the copies I musn't spill stuff on and can't let get scrunched up and dog-eared in the chaos of my big bag.

(How ironic the other day that I remembered my novel, but not my purse. I had Money, but no money, haha.)

Among my other reads - The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng, which I am very much enjoying and am nearly two-thirds through. (It's a substantial read!). But since this is presently sub-judice, I can't say any more about it for now. Also Dina Zaman's I Am Muslim which I'm proofreading, and which is informing and delighting me even as I scribble corrections on it.

More about all of these reads in the fullness of time.

But more importantly, what are YOU reading?

Pynchon On Pinchin'

The fallout from the Ian McEwan did-he-or-didn't-he
-plagiarise-and-anyway-does-it-matter debate continues.

The Independent reports that: ...

Lucilla Andrews' 30-year-old book No Time for Romance, previously on sale on Amazon for $12.50, has jumped to $2,185.71 (£1,100).

Novelists from the usually reclusive Thomas Pynchon to Zadie Smith have leapt passionately to McEwan's defense, and yesterdays' Times lists their statements. The most succinct is Martin Amis:

Historical fiction – as opposed to historical fantasy – cannot be written without help from historical sources. The novelist acknowledges that help, with gratitude, and the world moves on.

while the snippiest is Margaret Atwood who offers the lovely expression "flea-hitching" to posterity. ('Scuse me while I scratch.)

Meanwhile Ben McIntire finds himself "in bed with McEwan" and quite enjoying it.

Natasha Alden, the PhD student whose research started the furor explains the purpose of her research and the questions it has thrown up about the right and proper way of using other people's writing. She notes:

It is very difficult for anyone not to be influenced by vivid and well written words and not to replicate them, consciously or unconsciously. The novel is a hybrid form – based in reality, but making something new; this is particularly apparent in historical novels. Historical details, as McEwan has said, bring life and vigour to fiction. The imagination is crucial, but research brings truth. So what is the novelists’ responsibility to their sources? How can a contemporary novel speak to the past, or speak out of it ...?

(I do hope Ms. Alden eventually turns her thesis into a book. I'd want to buy it.)

Of all the musings on the topic, I most enjoyed Robert McCrum's article in last Sunday's Observer. (Shakespeare a pickpocket?)

So the jury has delivered its judgment. It is a much comforting one for all fictionators. And the whole business has created an entertaining little side-show for the last few days.

Perhaps now poor Mr. McEwan can go back to his work.

(Above: Pynchon's letter pinchoned from McEwan's website. All in the interest of research, you understand. Click and click to read.)

Best of British

Remember all the kerfuffle back in May over the New York Times attempt to find the Great American novel?

To even up the score, the Observer decided to hold a similar poll to find the best British novel and asked 150 "literary luminaries" to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. Writes Robert McCrum a bit sniffily:

In the novel, as in everything else, there are Anglo-Saxon and American attitudes. We celebrate a literary tradition of astonishing variety. They want to believe in the Great American Novel, the classic exemplar, the last word. We don't really believe in the last word, prefer not to be told what's best and would rather make our own discoveries.

Nice example of British perveristy that!

First place went to JM Coetzee's Disgrace.

Second prize went to Martin Amis' Money.

Joint third place to Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.

Then jumping to eigth place, we have:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern.

I'm happy enough so far, with the exception of Disgrace at the top of the pile. (I have had a few heated arguments with Mr. Raman over this title, which he would put on this pedestal too. I thought it very good, but I much prefer Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Age of Iron.)

I'd have had Rushdie in no. 1 spot - in terms of sheer influence alone.

The Remains of the Day I'd have pushed a bit higher.

I didn't terribly like The Blue Flower and couldn't see why it was so raved about. (That annoying feeling of other people finding much more in a book than you do.)

I hadn't even heard of John McGahern (let me just go beat myself up!!)

The list of other nominations is also interesting and contains many of my favourite books, and a useful reference for gap filling.

(I've read 30 of the listed titles, so still some way to go!)

Observer reader's comment on the poll can be found here.