MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train—along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023.
“Koba the Dread is filled with passion and intelligence, and with
prose that gleams and startles.... This fierce little book...[has
the] power to surprise, and ultimately to provoke, enrage and
illuminate.” –San Jose Mercury News
“Heartfelt.... Amis does not shrink from difficult questions about
possible moral distinctions between Lenin and Stalin, Stalin and
Hitler.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Riveting...Martin Amis has a noble purpose in writing Koba the
Dread. He wants to call attention to just what an insanely cruel
monster Josef Stalin was.” –Seattle Times
“Martin Amis is our inimitable prose master, a constructor of
towering English sentences, and his life…is genuinely worth writing
about.” –Esquire
This passionate and intensely personal book by novelist Amis (London Fields) evokes a terrible crime, in fact several million crimes. Koba is Joseph Stalin, the 20 million his victims. Interwoven with his impressionistic narrative (which owes much to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest) are details of Amis's family history, along with his sparring with the memory of his late father, Kingsley, and a close friend, the English journalist Christopher Hitchens, both one-time defenders of Soviet rule. Amis cuts to and from these and other personalities, throwing in details of the appalling horrors of Stalinist misrule, in a kaleidoscopic narrative flow. Who was worse: the Little Mustache (Hitler) or the Big Mustache (Stalin)? Why is the latter's evil not as widely acknowledged as the former's? Amis concludes his book with a single family death, contrasting its pathos with, in Stalin's celebrated expression, the "mere statistic" of the death of millions. A personal and polemical reaction to human and historical tragedy on both a small and a large scale, this is not an easy read. While the book reveals nothing new historiographically, it will appeal to admirers of Amis's literary panache. Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, ON Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
"Koba the Dread is filled with passion and intelligence, and
with prose that gleams and startles.... This fierce little
book...[has the] power to surprise, and ultimately to provoke,
enrage and illuminate." -San Jose Mercury News
"Heartfelt.... Amis does not shrink from difficult questions about
possible moral distinctions between Lenin and Stalin, Stalin and
Hitler." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Riveting...Martin Amis has a noble purpose in writing Koba the
Dread. He wants to call attention to just what an insanely cruel
monster Josef Stalin was." -Seattle Times
"Martin Amis is our inimitable prose master, a constructor of
towering English sentences, and his life...is genuinely worth
writing about." -Esquire
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