Dear Illusion: Selected Stories

Начало книги

What is today’s reader offered by the work of Kingsley Amis? This may not seem an especially pertinent question to ask of a writer who only died in 1995, but in art the recent past can sometimes appear more outmoded and inaccessible than distant history. The living writer is close to the common well of experience; once the writer has died, and can no longer articulate our contemporary world for us, he is exposed to the more brutal judgement of time. What in his work is timeless? What, if anything, makes it worth preserving? Of course, definitive answers to these questions aren’t always found: dead writers continue to go in and out of fashion, their work suddenly meaningful again in one era then failing to make sense in the next. It is often the most passionately contemporary writers — Kingsley Amis was one — whose reputations decline most steeply in their absence, for obvious reasons. Relevance becomes irrelevance; the same devotion to the here and now that brought them popularity and fame ensures their obscurity once here and now have become there and then. Yet the observation of ordinary life nearly always forms the cornerstone of great and lasting art. It is the quality of that observation that is put to the test over time, that will determine whether the work is trivial or lastingly true.

Читать дальше →