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. Yes, there are a lot of good things in this book, but as a whole it’s not the enjoyable read his best novels are.

I got the impression that either Martin has a very impressive vocabulary or he was using ancient thesauri to pull out lesser used synonyms to pepper his narrative. Before Experience I might compare him with a kind of ‘ mean friend’ that the child within you desperately hopes to please. Grandmother Dodo's disclosure had not rendered Israel any less mechanistic or expansionist or quasi-democratic. Focusing on his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, the disappearance of his cousin in 1973, and having his top teeth completely removed at age 45.It is hard to remember whether these risible sentences occur in Craig Brown's inspired parody in Private Eye or in Experience itself. And the rest of his discourse can be found in 'On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs' (Grand Street, Summer 1988), which he wrote as a Jew.

Though he had confidence in his intellectual strengths, he was worried that interviewers would misinterpret his odd styles of analysis and critique. While I admire Kingsley, I wanted to read the memoir of Martin, not a sad but arduous depiction of his father's death. Both The Letters of Kingsley Amis and Experience, in their separate ways, seem to have been compiled with one eye on a remote and exacting audience: posterity.E poi le riflessioni sulla scrittura e sugli scrittori venerati (Nabokov e Bellow su tutti) e sulle tragedie e le commedie dell’essere al mondo.