Pl. Catalunya, 39-41 08820 El Prat de Llobregat T 93.370.51.52 b.prat.am@diba.es Horari: dilluns de 15.30 a 21 Dimarts a divendres de 10 a 21 Dissabtes de 10 a 19
October 2011
ENGLISH READING CLUB
ENJOY READING! MARTIN AMIS House of meetings
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MARTIN AMIS (Oxford, England, 25th August 1949)
----------------------------------- BIOGRAPHY
Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, the son of the writer Kingsley Amis. He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and the USA, and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English. He wrote and published his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman ----------------------------------------------- ORA Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. He is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. Martin Amis lives in London. He became Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University in 2007.
-----------------------------SELECTED WORKS Novels • The Rachel Papers (1973), filmed in 1989 • Dead Babies (1975), filmed in 2000 • Success (1978) • Other People (1981) • Money (1984), filmed in 2010 • London Fields (1989) • Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence (1991) • The Information (1995) • Night Train (1997) • Yellow Dog (2003) • House of Meetings (2006) • The Pregnant Widow (2010) • The State of England: Lionel Asbo, Lotto Lout (2011) Collections • Einstein's Monsters (1987) • Two Stories (1994) • God's Dice (1995) • Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998) • Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999) • The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000) • Vintage Amis (2004) Non fiction • Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982) • The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986) • Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993) • Experience (2000) • The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001) • Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) • The Second Plane (2008)
-----House of meetings (2006)
House of Meetings is narrated by a man in 2004 who tells his story and that of his brother and the woman they both loved. The narrator was a Russian soldier during World War II, raping his way across Eastern Europe. He tells this information as the way it was then. His brother, Lev, was an idealistic poet, and they both fell in love with a Jewish woman named Zoya, although her nickname was "The Americas" because she was shaped like the continents. Zoya chooses Lev for a husband. The brothers get caught up by the Stalinist purges and are sent to a Siberian gulag. The prisoners' wives travel great distances for conjugal visits, which take place in the house of meetings. When Zoya comes to visit Lev, he emerges a lesser man. The mystery of what happened there is the key to the narrator's story. This novel was written by Amis during a two year long self-imposed exile in Uruguay.