I understand that the marble fidelity of the reader of this Saturday Punyalada may waver if today, which is a natural day to make good resolutions at the start of another year, I set out to talk about a book that, basically, is about getting sick and dying. But here we are coneguts and saludats from quite some time ago and I suppose it will not be a surprise if I stray from the cliché of writing about the Spartan anxiety of losing weight, learning German, or spending more time with family.
The first day of the first month tends to look forward, it is true, but (whether you are in the mezzo del camino like me or already in the twilight of your career, whether due to the effect of yesterday's confined farra or the simple passage of time), today you will have woken up with an indescribable feeling of subtracting. This is what Martin Amis's great work, Inside Story, is about, a book that, at 72, could also be the farewell and testament of an author who, far from settling for fame and waiting for the Nobel to fall from the couch, has set out to novelize something as difficult to write about as his own finitude and that of his closest friends.
We always read from our present and it is a macabre curiosity that contingency brings us closer to this monumental book in a pandemic time (namely, one of the first historical moments in which most beings in the first world have again experienced as real the possibility of falling ill and dying). This concern has two antecedents that were already a very clear obsession of the author; the Holocaust, which marks the first attempt to annihilate an entire race, and then 9/11, the attack on the Twin Towers, a jihadist pirouette that, in addition to filling the entire south of Manhattan with carcinogenic dust, dynamited the end of history through the creative and violent performance of a new enemy who, basically, is bothered by everything we enjoy. Amis's concern has dedicated many pages to the temporal arc that goes from the 1940s to the beginning of the 21st century; now he has preferred to look at the map up close to see how death appears in the decadence and the passing of two models of strength that the author confesses to living as the last enlightened people of his world.
We always read from our present and it is a macabre curiosity that contingency brings us closer to this monumental book in a pandemic timeI understand that the reader may hesitate whether to continue reading for a second time.In an absurd country like ours, obsessed with making television pornography with the mentally ill and with a political and journalistic intelligentsia that likes itself the more moribund it exposes itself, a volume of almost seven hundred pages about woodworm would result in a tortuous surfeit of nostalgia and kitsch.But Amis writes from a literary heritage of cut stone and from an idea of civilization that filters adversity in the form of very high literature. This is how the writer decides to surpass himself (for his close friends, to go beyond the autobiographical spirit he had already tried in the wonderful novelExperience) to curl the curl with an artifact with which he not only makes fun of the literary genre, as he has almost always done, but also claims to have the last word on the character that critics and the imaginary have made of himself. He expresses it by quoting Larkin's verses, perhaps the putative phantasmagoric that most permeates this text; "My life is for me. / It would be like ignoring gravity."
There is an ancient morality in the Amisian worldview, and this is how the author loves Saul Bellow, the literary hero, but especially his brother Christopher Hitchens, the impenitent Trotskyist who, nevertheless, defends the Yankee spirit of rushing into war when civilization needs to boost morale. Bellow's Alzheimer's attacks the titan's memory and Hitch's throat cancer castrates the word and breath of a man who seduced almost unintentionally. An ancient ethic, I repeat, that which drives man (masculine) to narrate himself in his love stories in an era when taking a girl to bed was not considered an aggression. There will be those who read these pages as the last breath of an old fart who glimpses the decadence of the West filtered into what, ultimately, are two quite comfortable deaths. But, fortunately, Amis does not waste time conversing with the well-meaning or the feminists of Twitter; from a young age he understood that the only dialogue imposed on the writer is between the self and the great history of literature. Everything else, despite whom it may concern, is moralizing.
Amis understood from a young age that the only dialogue imposed on the writer is between the self and the great history of literatureIn a world where the warrior heroism of men is already a hindrance (the author recalls how his father Kingsley, apart from racking his brains, also had time to enlist in the army), Amis clings to the example of a friend who approaches the rot of cancer by drinking and smoking until almost his last breath and writing a thousand words every day without complaining.It turns out to be a revelation that the prodigious technique of this prose approaches an ethical principle as simple and complex at the same time, practically homoerotic, as vigor.To the strength of his friend Hitch, Amis contrasts his younger self, a wandering journalist who wastes time and energy trying to satisfy the spirit of an impossible woman, Phoebe Phelps, while claiming the only virtue he can display and teach; the secret of sculpting the perfect sentence. He does it again, novelizing conversations with Bellow and Hitch as if they were a Socratic cascade, aware of the dialogical artificiality and the excessive pretension of the path. It is his life and the death of his friends; and he tells it as he pleases, of course!
Finitude is expected but appears suddenly, when Bellow begins to repeat the same questions and Christopher says he can no longer breathe. Even in those pre-mortem moments, the friends ironize about the passing, speculating on how our lord god (lowercase) intends to castrate their throats (and crotches). Whoever seeks sentimental prose about tumors and the martyrdom of cancer, I'm sorry, should go elsewhere. Here, life is explained from the intersection of shared tears and smiles (as the title itself expresses, Inside story, a double play that I perhaps would have translated with another expression than the one chosen by our great and indefatigable Ferran Ràfols, who, on the other hand, filters Amisian prose with a precise scalpel) and memory, as in great authors, only sprouts when its explainer dedicates himself to imagining possible, hypothetical, who knows if plausible pasts. Backstabbers, listen to me, stop with entertainment and circumstantial novels and devour this great and who knows if last book by Martin Amis.
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