Proms Plus Literary: Martin Amis
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2014
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Novelist Martin Amis discusses 'The Zone of Interest', his 14th novel, in which he revisits the Holocaust for the first time since his controversial book, 'Time's Arrow'. This programme presented by Philip Dodd, was recorded in front of an audience at The Royal College of Music as part of the BBC Proms. To find out further information about the events which are free to attended go to bbc.co.uk/proms.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. A comic writer in whose work the reader can encounter Stalin and Auschwitz, a moralist, best known for his stylistic extravagance, |
| 0:56.9 | a writer settled in New York, who's marinated in Englishness. |
| 1:02.5 | My guest this evening is the writer Martin Amos, who turned 65 this week. |
| 1:08.2 | He published his first novel in 1973, but I suppose came to international prominence |
| 1:14.3 | in the 1980s with books such as money and London fields, novels compelled and appalled by excess. |
| 1:24.1 | His new novel, The Zone of Interest, his 14th, is set during the Second World War |
| 1:29.8 | in an around-a-concentration camp that has more than echoes of Auschwitz. |
| 1:36.1 | One of the three narrators is Paul Dole, the camp commandant another Golompson, |
| 1:41.4 | a Nazi who believes that they will and should lose. |
| 1:46.0 | And the third, Schmull, a Jewish prisoner whose life depends on collaborating with his captors |
| 1:51.4 | and who has to loot the bodies of the dead amongst many other things. |
| 1:56.4 | The novel set just as the Nazis begin to be defeated in Russia, |
| 2:02.4 | weaves together the public story of what happened in the camps with the story of Thompson's desire for Dole's wife. |
| 2:09.4 | For some, the rapid shifts in tone, the troubling mix of sexual farce and historical tragedy |
| 2:15.5 | are too much. For others, they are the novel's glory. Martin, |
| 2:21.3 | I want to come back to that, if I may, but I want to start your 65, you and I are the same age, |
| 2:27.1 | were born after the Second World War, but you belong to a generation, Howard Brenton, |
| 2:32.6 | David Hare, amongst others, who keep going back to that |
| 2:36.0 | period. What compels you to return? Well, I was born four years after the death of Hitler, |
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