Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions

The book I read for the 2021 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE in the category Essay Collection is Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions, by Martin Amis, 1993.

I’ve never been interested in essay collections. Maybe I had to write too many essays throughout school and university. But any time I read a review of an essay collection that sounds interesting, I check it out in a bookstore and put it down again. So to find a book for the ‘essay collection’ category of this Reader Challenge, I decided to browse the essay shelf in the library.

First the title caught my eye, and then the first sentence of the blurb on the back: “Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike: …” then follows a list of the people mentioned in the separate chapters. I was familiar with the author’s name, but had never read anything he wrote. Conversations with different people (of different levels of interest for me) sounded like something I could enjoy; some that I wanted to read about included Vera Nabokov, Graham Greene, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Philip Larkin, Isaac Asimov, Roman Polanski and John Lennon. So I thought I could be introduced to two new things: essay collection and Martin Amis.

The chapters are essays he wrote before 1984 for various publications (e.g., The New Yorker, The Observer, The Atlantic) and are mainly on the subjects of people, sports, reminiscences. According to the author’s introduction, “Getting out of the house is the only thing that unites the pieces in the present book,” and this lack of cohesion makes the book seem like a hodgepodge of his old material.

I did not find any of the chapters on sports interesting, and thought that instead I would enjoy the interviews. But contrary to the book blurb, I did not find the “portraits” to be “dazzling.” They didn’t seem to be portraits because they were more about Amis than the interviewee. And they didn’t seem like interviews because I didn’t learn much about the personalities he wrote about. He focused more on his reactions and impressions to the people he’s with and his knowledge of their work or life. And his reactions and impressions were not particularly interesting. In fact, many of the chapters were so boring that I found myself skimming through them.

So I read a book in the category ‘Essay Collection’ for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge – but it was quite a challenge.