The world of the novel is seen through the eyes of its narrator, John Self, thirty-five, who, like all his generation (of the eighties, of all time) worships with his money (of which he has plenty) three gods, which are not only his reason of being but also his explanation for all zany situations he restores afterwards from, disparate clues and pains in the ass (literally!) that give an incomplete but funny idea of what must have happened: Lots of literary allusions are peppered through the text, including an increasing number to the author himself, the ultimate hero of the piece, who proposes the redemptive force of literature as an antidote to the Reagan/Thatcherite legacy. Right, that’ll do it. I’ll write to Trump and Weinstein to clue them in. As he wrote his way through his 20s, Amis seemed happy to turn out more of these scabrous slices of comic fiction with a taste for the gruesome, where bad things happen to worse people – Dead Babies, Success – though he argued that complaining about “nastiness” in novels was an “extra-literary response”. The prose was all. So, to say that I loved it....no, can't say that I did. To say that I hated it, absolutely not..... Mi ripeto perchè è strano a dirsi ma io non l’ho odiato piuttosto ho provato gran pena per lui ( ”consumato dal consumismo”) e quello che rappresenta.

In person, Amis appeared to live so comfortably in his own head that he wasn’t always in touch socially. At the height of his youthful swagger, he published a kind of how-to book for video games: “ Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines,” which, toward the end of his life, even he grudgingly admitted wasn’t, you know, his best work. (And Amis rarely admitted he wrote anything less than perfect—this was an unexpectedly endearing quality.) To this day, I still smart from my first visit to the Bayswater flat where he did his writing. We sat chatting. He rolled a cigarette and spontaneously revealed that he had just looked at how much money he had in his bank account. “I had an idea,” he said. “I was wrong . . . by a factor of ten.” I took this in, doing various calculations in my head. After all, I was the guy with an overdraft trying to put out a literary magazine. John Self is a rogue. One, who is impatient to make money, more and more money in life to spend in excess. One who remains drunk all day long. Night too. For days at stretch. Indulges in sex. Want to make porn movies. To make more money. You get the picture, right? And what with the abysmal language Amis writes this work in? What can one expect to find? Why should it be rated five stars? This is a hard book to review. 'Money'. I'll probably have to let the whole thing soak. It was brilliant, nimble, sharp, hard, completely balls-out-nuts and pornographic (not really in the PORNporn way, but in the MONEYporn way--yeah, folks, listen to the book you won't understand till you listen to it). As an aside, tho, if any Goodreads Developers happen to be reading this: they should consider developing and releasing into the wild another star, a discretionary sixth star -- specifically, the power to harness such a star (in extraordinary situations only) for the purpose of reviewing those rare few books that are just thermonuclearly great. But this power should be granted only to certain users: only those users who have demonstrated consistently exceptional dedication, taste, subtlety, restraint and eloquence in their Goodreadsing. Myself, for example. Possibly others, too. But I would be willing to beta test this new star. Here is why: Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis at the Guildhall in London for the 1991 Booker prize awards. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PAThe enduring legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher isn’t conservatism as a political programme but narcissism as a mode of living. As the aptly named John Self says in Money, “You just gave us some money... but you hate me, don’t you. Yes you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. We’re here to stay. You try getting us out ... My way is coming up in the world” Above all, he was a champion of irony, which he recognised as an imperilled foundation stone of civilisation. He raged against “the forces of stupidity, literalism, ignorance, humourlessness.”

I finished this book days ago, and I have to say that I am glad I read it. Many times Martin made me laugh outloud......I am having a very hard time deciding what kind of review to write for this....it's about Money,and how Money jades you,makes you a sinner, etc. etc. etc. Amis got it exactly right. John Self is now the new normal. The physical embodiment of his ethos is Trump and Harvey Weinstein. John Self is their fictional prototype: coarse, uneducated, racist, misogynistic, overweight, and entirely without taste. He not only became acceptable in polite circles, he became their centre. “You know where you are with economic necessity,” Self opines, by which he means money is the only criterion of value. Therefore more is always better, even if there is no object in having it except having it.L’ironia, il sarcasmo che non risparmia nessuno (neppure se stesso) e niente dato che anche i nomi ironizzano sulle caratteristiche (negative) dei personaggi (persino la macchina si chiama “Fiasco”!!!) Dirò molto, invece, di come ho vissuto questa lettura e del perché non riesco a dare un giudizio preciso. Now, 12 years later, he has died of the very same illness, oesophageal cancer, that killed Hitchens. And this is not just very sad (though it is most certainly that). Suddenly, the cultural continuum feels as though it is shuddering, warped out of shape by what Amis would have called a “Main Event”. When Kingsley died, he said that “we were all chastened by the dimensions of the void that replaced him.” Exactly. Ho iniziato a provare interesse e quel senso di repulsione nel riprendere la lettura stava quasi scomparendo.

I’ve been regretting my hesitancy this past week. But what was best in Amis—the pungent humor, the wry sanity, the rapturous alertness and responsiveness—remains present in his books. As I write this, they are splayed open all over my desk. I expect them to remain there for some time. —Giles Harvey The narrator - John Self - is literally one of the most repugnant characters you will ever meet. He's that despicable misogynistic alcoholic over there in the suit, drowning in his own excess. Alcohol, pornography, hedonism and, of course, money are his life, and he is a cringy embarrassment even to the reader. Typical line “I want to shout with pain and pull the world apart, but I just vaguely peek in the direction of the girl’s breasts.”Amis began a relationship with the American-Uruguayan writer Isabel Fonseca, and the pair married in 1996, going on to have two daughters. Fonseca later turned to fiction herself, publishing her debut novel Attachment in 2009. But, like a Pirandello’s character, our hero refuses to sign his suicide note and breaks free from the end of the book as it had been thought, spooking his Martin Amis who catches a glimpse of him – where else? – in a bar. Despoiled of his money (and his life plot) John Self is stubborn enough to live, challenging thus the powers of his maker, while claiming his own immortality: