Reviews

Heavy Water and Other Stories by Martin Amis

joemacare's review

1.0

A masterclass in douchery from the most politically reprehensible and aesthetically ugly writer in the UK.

kirstiecat's review against another edition

3.0

This barely gets the 3/5 stars I am giving it and I am really starting to think Martin Amis is a little over-rated. One thing I can definitely say is that I have enjoyed his novels more. There are only two stories I found to be 4/5 star quality and the rest were more like 2/5. Those two stories were the title story and "The Coincidence of the Arts." At times ,one senses that Martin Amis is trying to be creative and a little twisted but ends up missing the mark and creating stories that detach the reader from the characters. At other times , the story just isn't unique enough to hold interest.

Basically, this is a fairly short collection at just a little over 205 pages that I read on the plane to California last night that was overall disappointing and made me wish I had chosen a different book to bring with me instead .

I will have to add a couple of quotes to this when I get back to Chicago .

annabdavid's review against another edition

5.0

The story about the screenwriter and the literary writer switching worlds should be required reading for every writer.

gh7's review against another edition

2.0

Apart from the odd brilliant one liner - "It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first." - and naughty joke I can't say I found much nourishment here. Often with Amis, the catalyst for his work seems to be a joke. It was an inspiration that worked well for him with his middle period novels. A literary writer jealous of his hack writer friend's massive success and his backfiring determination to do him harm. Using a proficiency at darts to evoke the paucity of cultural aspiration in the Britain of the 1990s. Deploying a narrative that runs backwards to write about the Holocaust. Some of these stories too are founded on a joke. What if poets made huge bucks and sci fi screenwriters had to publish their work in pokey magazines? What if most people in the world were gay and straight people were vilified? The problem for me was he failed to animate or give much depth to any of these comic inversions. The story with the most scope for vituperative social criticism and pathos follows a woman and her down-syndrome son on a cruise. But even this turned out to be a bit boring. The final story was unreadable. Safe to say, the short story and Martin Amis is not a match made in heaven. I've made a promise to myself to revisit Amis this year to discover to what extent my youthful enthusiasm now seems warranted.

annadeedee's review

challenging funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

thebobsphere's review

4.0

I'm a fan of Martin Amis' novels but he can write a very good short story. The best one is about an Onanist, the other stories include a woman taking her handicapped son on a cruise, a person using a machine to predict his assassination and a bouncer thinking about the past. All are funny and intelligently written.