When I was spending a fair amount of time in Manhattan in the 1980s, Martin Amis was a name I heard a lot. My friend Michael Shain, then a reporter for the New York Post, designated a different Amis novel for each of his friends. (Mine was The Information, which I still have not read.) I followed the Amis career without ever really becoming engaged with his novels. But in interviews he would often say something that hit me directly, as when he mentioned being ambushed by memories that were accompanied by searing regret, just walking down the street and thinking of something else. This was an experience I often had, but which I’d never heard anyone else confess.
When Amis died last May I noticed how he was almost universally praised as a literary eminence. (He was Sir Martin by then.) So I went back to his more famous novels (Money, London Fields), neither of which I could finish once again, and I read entirely his last novel (Inside Story) and his collection of essays and reviews, The War Against Cliché. In both I responded to gems of insight and stylish writing, but on first reading I couldn’t experience Inside Story as a whole novel, for all its shining parts. So I remain a frustrated reader of a writer with whom I nevertheless felt an odd bond, as much for many differences as for similarities and sympathies. The tension of that seems productive and affectionate.
Another novelist much talked about in the 1980s was Milan Kundera, principally for one book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, now a classic of the era. I read it with fascination, and found his previous novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in English through the auspices of Philip Roth and his series of works by Eastern European authors. More recently I read Kundera's Slowness, and wrote about it here.
With the paradox of its title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed to become fashionable mostly because of the sex, though Italo Calvino pointed out that its virtues were the liveliness and intelligence of the writing. I doubt I understood or endorsed a lot of it, but I liked its rhythms and it did feel like something I hadn’t encountered before in fiction. I better understood the meditations on the speed of life today and the paradoxes of memory in Slowness.
Cormac McCarthy was a controversial and respected novelist over several decades. Though his fifth novel in 1985, Blood Meridian, became recognized over time, his first commercial success was All the Pretty Horses in 1992. Probably his biggest and most enduring literary, cultural and popular success was the haunting post-apocalyptic tale, The Road.
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| some of the books by Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman |
Harold Bloom called Edith Grossman “the Glenn Gould of translators,” because she too was a precise virtuoso. Her translations of Latin American authors, together with those of Gregory Rabassa, helped fuel the boom for these novelists in the 1970s and 80s. In particular she translated seven books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said that he preferred reading her English translations (and Rabassa’s) to his Spanish originals.
Russell Banks was a prolific American novelist and story writer who detailed working class lives but also wrote about Jamaica and Haiti and The Magic Kingdom. He was especially beloved by fellow literary writers.
Robert Brustein was a titan of modern theatre in America, founding both the Yale Repertory Company and the American Repertory Company at Harvard. He backed his work as a producer, director, actor and playwright with essays and books from The Theatre of Revolt (1964) and Who Needs Theatre? (1987) to Winter Passages (2014.) He engaged in many controversies, such as his debates with playwright August Wilson.
British Jungian psychologist Anthony Stevens wrote several books on Jung and his theories, particularly on archetypes and dreams. I remember reading with pleasure Ronald Steel’s sterling biography of journalist Walter Lippmann, and D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel. I recall enjoying Francois Gilot’s reminiscences of her uneasy life with Picasso when I read them in the 1970s, and Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: An American Voyage in the 1980s.
As the last veterans of World War II fade away, so do the authors who examined aspects and outcomes of that war. Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe wrote about the legacy of the atomic bomb in Japan, while Selichi Moriura exposed Japanese wartime atrocities. Marga Minco wrote about the ramifications of the Holocaust and the war in postwar Europe.
Also among the writers who passed on in 2023 were poets Louise Gluck, Charles Simic, Naomi Replansky, Robert Pack, Benjamin Zephaniah, David Ferry, Saskia Hamilton, Park Je-chun, Amy Utematsu, Trienke Laurie, Antonio Gala, Asad Gulzoda, R.H.W. Dillard, Robin Mathews, Maria Laina and Wendy Barker; playwrights Tina Howe, Megan Terry, Robert Patrick, John Mairai and Ama Ata Aidoo; eminent screenwriter Bo Goldman; novelist/playwright Fay Weldon, story writer Edith Pearlman, novelists AS Byatt, Herbert Gold, Ted Morgan, Eve Bunting, Meir Shalev, Martin Walser, David Benedictis, and Amy Schwartz.
In genre fiction: Carol Higgins Clark (mystery), K.C. Constantine (master of the police procedural--more about him later), John Dunning (detective fiction and books on old time radio), John Jakes (historical), Julie Garwood (romance); Michael Bishop, Michael A. Banks and Richard Bowes (science fiction.)
Artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan, sociologist and communitarian visionary Amitai Etzioni, historians Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Eugenio Riccomini and Marceli Kosman; feminist scholars Dale Spender and Jean F. Yellin, psychologist Alice K. Ladas, philosophers Harry Frankfurt and Ian Hacking; crime writers Anne Perry and Mary Willis Walker; satirist Dan Greenberg.
Writers William Howarth, Gail Tremblay, Phillipe Sollers, Luca di Fulvia, Doris Gregory, Michael Denneny, Zaleka Mandela, Echo Brown, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ramzi Salame, Darchhawna and Ronald Blythe.
Journalists Betty Rollin, Kevin Phillips, Victor Navasky, Michael Parkington, Paul Bradeur, Warren Hoge, James Reston, Jr., Bernard Kalb, Hugh Aynesworth, Eva Hauseserova, Howard Weaver, Edwin Wilson, Michel Ciment, Jack Anderson, Colin Spencer, Bill Shipp, Mandy Jenkins, Ian Black.
Apologies for misspellings and misappropriations. May they and all the writers who died last year rest in peace—their work lives on.
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