Schweres Wasser und andere Erzählungen

by Martin Amis

These nine stories span a period from 1975 to 1997 and are a good reflection of the range of Martin Amis's writing, which is always skillful and consistently seductive--sometimes irritatingly so. Amis lures his reader into an intense interest in his characters, and then, in some unsettling way, encourages us to patronize or disparage them. It's an odd strategy, but it holds our attention. By making us uncomfortable about our own less admirable attitudes, he focuses us intently on his story line.

In "Coincidence of the Arts," the targets are the feckless painter Sir Rodney Peel and his black doorman, aspiring novelist Pharsin Courier, who turns to him for artistic encouragement. When Peel embarks on a curious affair with a black waitress, it is sheer coincidence that she should happen to be Pharsin's wife. The consequences reflect well on neither man. In "State of England," we smirk knowingly at Big Mal, a bullshitting East Ender trying to sort out his life at his small son's sports day, but we are nevertheless compelled to find out what will become of him. Familiar stories about obsessive bad sex such as "Let Me Count the Times" have not stood the test of time, and Amis's tales of literary agents, aspiring novelists, and spoiled bestseller writers may only interest an inner coterie. Still, when he is on form, Amis's work is as deeply alluring as it is amusing. --Lisa Jardine, Amazon.co.uk

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, British Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, 20th Century

281 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Four stories in, and I am done with this tripe. A guy constantly spanking the monkey whilst bent over his wife's face isn't what I expected, but to be honest, I didn't know what to expect, having never read him before. Even skipped to the title story 'Heavy Water' in the hope of that at least being worthy of being the title story. No, not really. It's difficult for me to pass judgement on Martin Amis on a few measly short-stories, of which ranged from the 70's to the 90's (some even featured in the New Yorker), added to fact I have yet to read one of his novels (why I made the strange decision to read this, and not one of his better known works as my first Amis is a mystery to me), but going by just half of this collection, he is either just not suited and booted as a writer of the short-story format, or, because of what he writes about, just makes him simply not my kind of writer full stop. I will likely have a crack at one of his novels, but will not be rushing off in great anticipation any time soon to expeditiously grab hold of one. I am now tempted to lie through my teeth and tell the relative in question they have great taste when it comes to writers, giving me a better chance of receiving a nice book voucher for Christmas!. And no, they are not part of the GR family, so thankfully won't be reading this.

[Violet wells · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this collection vary wildly in terms of length, subject matter, characterization and literary device. Amis moves effortlessly across continents, depicting British and American culture convincingly and creating vivid and unique characters. The stories here have an experimental feel and as with all experiments, some work better than others.

Amis is strongest when portraying British working class people, with that classic British dry humor and wit. This is best illustrated in “State of England,” which also deftly handles race relations in modern, ethnically diverse London.

“What Happened to Me on My Holiday” is written in a made up dialect that is difficult to grasp at first but worth putting in the effort. It turns out to be a surprisingly effective technique for portraying a young boy’s first experiences with death.

I struggled with “The Janitor on Mars,” an odd juxtaposition of intelligent (if sadistic) life on mars and pedophilia in an orphanage here on earth. It was a long read, heavy on scientific jargon that became tiresome for me.

Most of these stories have been published elsewhere, three in The New Yorker, as well as in Esquire, Granta and other publications. So clearly they enjoy some critical acclaim. A fun diversion from the ordinary but not for everyone.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a parallel universe a talentless but commercially successful poetaster pulls down the Big Bucks with his sonnet ‘Sonnet’ and is fêted, lauded and jet-setted about ceaselessly by the boys in ‘Development’, while his impoverished and ignored counterpart struggles to place his screenplay with one of the many The Little Magazines of this world. Its title? Offensive From Quasar 13. In Amis’s mock-dystopic vision, the poets would finally get to legislate the hell out of Mankind and the brain-dead papmeisters of Hollywood would get their due comeuppance.

Or would they? Screenwriters were already the lowest form of life in Tinseltown, anyhow, and in the story (as in life) the Moguls still manage to find a way to get rich on something—on anything: for Business, life’s one real constant, is/was/ever-shall-be Business, after all, and if you couldn’t get the (born-every-minute) suckers to pay to see a movie, then you could sell’em something else - anything, perhaps even (Jesus!) Capital-P Poetry for Chrissakes.

—This story, ‘Career Move’ is worth the price of admission alone in this somewhat uneven but always inventive collection. Recommended for Amis fans, but not for first-timers. Or screenwriters.

[Toby · Rating 2 out of 5]

It would appear that short stories are not the forte of Martin Amis if this collection is anything to go by.

This collection isn't even wildly uneven in its quality and instead varies from the awful to the OK to the unreadable. Throughout my reading experience I struggled desperately to find something to cling to, some form of entertainment or enjoyment or depth to the prose but I just couldn't locate any of that or any of what I usually take from a Martin Amis work.

It has allowed me, however, to try to put a finger on what it is I usually find so appealing about the man's work. So far all I have is the voice of his characters, definitely something that was lacking within every single story in this collection and usually something applied by Amis with an over enthusiasm for the vagaries and minutiae of individual experience.

In this way I would pick State of England as my highlight, as it was the closest we get to a traditional Amis-esque story except that it reads almost like a discarded early draft of London Fields. At the other end of the spectrum What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a created 'dialect' that is pretty much unreadable and in the middle are stories that put a twist on contemporary society, what if poets were treated like screenwriters and screenwriters like poets? or what if being homosexual was the norm and heterosexual people the group of people struggling to prove that they are not deviants in the eyes of a biased society? They both read as obvious attempts to explore an idea more than to actually create an interesting story but remind me of wannabe authors in a creative writing class taught part time at night school than the work of a man who has won awards for his command of the English language in works of fiction.

Perhaps this is the way Martin Amis chooses to use the format of the short story and that's fine but if he is merely exploring throwaway ideas perhaps they shouldn't be collected and published in an attempt to legitimise them.

[Caty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually find Martin Amis to be a pale imitation of his acclaimed father and Will Self, but this collection includes one of my favorite short stories EVER: "The Janitor on Mars". Fucking amazing and I'll say no more.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Several years ago, perhaps many years ago, I decided Martin Amis's fiction was not worth reading because he was a snarky Brit who wasn't all that funny despite his barbed wit and talent for replicating the various accents of Britain's various social classes. Then I came back to Amis a few years ago and read some novels I liked because they were full, rounded, comical but serious.

Now I've made the mistake of trying to read a collection of Amis's stories called Heavy Water that comprises tales written from the 70s into the 90s. I suppose I wanted to see if I was wrong when I first wrote him off. Well, I wasn't. It's just that over time he has become a much better writer.

Back then Martin Amis wrote stories as if they were basically jokes. He'd develop a counterfactual conceit--for instance, that poems were treated like blockbusters by Hollywood moguls--and explore how weird that would be. Pretty weird. Or he would spin out a tale told by a janitor on Mars, eager to communicate with earth (or earthlings). Or he would describe a world in which the gays dominated the scene and the heterosexuals (the hets) were forced to play the role of the gays (mocked, dissed, what have you.) Lots of upside down and inside out stuff. Wouldn't it be funny if this . . . ? Wouldn't it be funny if that . . . ?

I won't belabor the point. One can see even in Amis's early stories the striking wit, gift with words and images, and pulsing cultural awareness that ultimately made him a significant writer. But he wasn't really interesting; he was the son of a better-known writer who worked his way through his apprenticeship and kept going. Good for him. Skip the early stuff and read what he's writing now.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A modest but enjoyable collection, marred by occasional over-reliance on a concept or conceit. While I enjoyed most of the stories to some extent, there are some missed opportunities or failed experiments.

Two of the stories ('Career Move' and 'Straight Fiction') rely on the same concept: a counter-world of inverted values. In the first, poets are hot commodities and become fabulously wealthy. In the second, almost everybody is gay (one assumes: the existence of lesbians is inferred but never touched upon) and heterosexuals are a tolerated and pitied minority.

Neither story amounts to much, leading me to suspect that they were perhaps written out of an excess of authorial self-regard. To be blunt, they seem like ideas born out of an evening of drinking with friends: "Hey, you should write a story where being straight is a social handicap!" Anyway, Anthony Burgess did the whole "gay as normal" thing in The Wanting Seed, back in 1962.

The last story ('What Happened to Me on Holiday') is very nearly unreadable. The stylistic conceit is a phonic rendering of the child narrator's heavily-accented speech. All but the last paragraph of the story izz renda endiz phazhin firzome reezin. It never gets eezear…sorry, 'easier' to read, and the point of the experiment and the story is lost. An awful and even infuriating reading experience.

Most of the stories are kind of plodding, middle-of-the-road pieces, neither actively bad nor remarkably good. These typically start from a sound if uninspiring (not to say clichéd) concept: a man waits calmly for his impending execution; a man in the middle of a divorce is struggling with being a good father; a man is frustrated because his wife doesn't want to have sex, etc. Not surprisingly, no great insights emerge from these humble beginnings, though they are decent reads.

When reading Amis, it's hard not to notice the politically and/or culturally conservative/reactionary elements. Only one story has a female protagonist, and the focus of the story is her son. This sexism will not surprise those who've read Amis before. Some of the descriptions of the clothes worn and food prepared by the gay narrator of 'Straight Fiction' seem to cross the line into rococo stereotype: at one point a character is preparing a main dish accented with pomegranate, passion fruit, papaya, pomelo, and Asian pear. Finally, there were some moments in one of the stories when the presentation of a black character seemed uncomfortably close to the edge of racial stereotype.

So why read the book? Two reasons.

First, I thought two of the stories ('The Coincidence of the Arts' and 'Heavy Water') were quite good. The first is effectively comedic, while the second is gently tragic. In these stories, initial concept, evocative writing, and narrative pay-off are all aligned. Recommended reading, in other words.

Second, the usual Amis quota of sparkling prose is to be found throughout the book, even in the less impressive stories. Some sample sentences illustrate the point:

• "It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first."

• "There was a lady, nearly Mother’s age, who with clockwork vigor performed a high-stepping music-hall number about prostitution, disease, and penury."

• "Rodney flattered, flirted, fumbled, failed."

• "He turned: a square lawn supporting two ancient trees, both warped and crushed by time into postures of lavatorial agony."

• "Between them bobbed other heads of hair work—gray streaks, pageboy, urchin, dyed caramel; and, among the men, various tragedies of disappearance, variously borne, and always the guy with a single strand pasted across his dome, as if one sideburn had thrown a line to the other."

• "Like a mirage of power and heat the touring-coaches throbbed on the quayside."

On the whole, it's a middling collection featuring a couple of standouts, a couple of clunkers, and a lot of perfectly serviceable writing. You could do a lot worse, but it won't make you forget (e.g.) Alice Munro or William Trevor.

[M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

After putting down both 'Money' and 'The Rachel Papers' without finishing them, I was skeptical about even buying this book which I did only because I found a pocket paperback copy of it and 'Dead Babies' at the used bookstore around the corner for only $2 each. Except for "Straight Fiction" (which is obvious and hardly clever even) and "What Happened to Me on My Holiday" (which, while fun to read, may be a bit too sentimental), every single one of these stories is phenomenal.

Martin Amis is endlessly clever, blunt, rash, poignant, insightful, touching, and shocking, all at the same time. His stories run the gamut from more traditional ("Heavy Water", where a mother struggles to entertain and manage her vaguely mentally handicapped son aboard a cruise ship), to gratuitous ("Let Me Count the Times", where a husband abandons his meticulous sexual practices with his wife for an affair...with himself) to science fiction ("The Janitor on Mars", where a "functional" pedophile working in an orphanage watches man's first encounter with Martians on the television while simultaneously attempting to find a rapist among his staff).

I came to this one with my arms crossed, but was overwhelmingly surprised. I loved it. Highly, highly recommended.

Personal favorites: "State of England", "The Coincidence of the Arts", "Heavy Water", and "The Janitor on Mars".

[M. Malmierca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colección de relatos poco realistas en los argumentos pero reales en el contenido. Cinismo muy interesante del autor de El libro de Rachel.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exceptional in parts, some wickedly biting satire that leaves you feeling just unclean enough after you've finished. Sadly, a little bit too meh in others...

[Fernanda Amis]

Love you. The janitor on mars

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not finish this book. The short stories were a chore, and as I’ve seen someone else say, it’s like amis tried to write stories around jokes, only the jokes themselves are particularly funny, and his stories don’t hit the mark at all.

[Nicholas Beck · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories originally published late 70's to late 90's in New Yorker, Esquire etc. If you've read Amis before, you know what to expect, if not it's a worthy collection of his sarcastic "take no prisoners" wit.

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally get why so many people like Martin Amis and so many dislike Martin Amis. He is such a skillful prose stylist that his stories can be as hard to put down as they are to finish because of his nasty characters and view of the world.

No, I do not like these stories very much but I admire the skill that went into writing them. Different people will prefer different stories, of course, but I favor the first and third where the author tries to get us to see the world differently by simple switches: in the first story screenwriters live the lives of poets and poets live the lives of screen writers. In the third, being gay is normal and being straight is controversial. While these both seemed clever for a while, both stories continued long past the point where I got the point. I'm not sure either did much to change my thinking about either matter.

In sum: if you like Martin Amis, have fun, but I don't think I need to bother with him again.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked up a lovely 1st edition hardcover in perfect condition for next to nothing in a lovely second hand bookstore in South Haven, MI when we were on holiday a few months ago. So its a collection of short stories mostly written in the 90s and with a couple of real gems. When Amis is biting and funny he is head and shoulders above everyone else. The satire about the movie business, applied to a poetry - 'his f-cking sonnet did forty million opening weekend' is wicked. And the story about the 'Straight District' in NY with the marginalised hetros campaigning for rights had just the right spot on details.

[maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin Amis is a talented prose stylist with a nasty world view. The stories in this collection range from awful to meh, with occasional flashes of brilliance. They're not nearly as good as his novels, with many reading like an abandoned attempt at a longer piece. The best of the lot:
- "Career Move" describes about a world in which poets are jet-setting Hollywood bigwigs while screenwriters are starving artists.
- "Let Me Count the Ways" describes a man who has an affair with himself.
- "Denton's Death" is an hallucinatory, existential piece about a man who is waiting for the arrival of his executioners.

[Exlibris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente libro, su manera de contar historias va más allá de describir las situaciones extrañas en las que sus protagonistas se meten. Desde mundos alternativos donde lo normal es ser gay, hasta otros donde los grandes estrenos son de libros y no de películas. Además de tener un tacto profundo al describir cada detalle haciéndote entrar de lleno al relato. Muy buenas historias.

[Karey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish this collection of eminently missable short stories. Narcissistic, shallow characters that I didn't care one hoot about. The "Let me count the times" story could summarise the whole collection - about a man's obsession with himself/masturbation with an unconvincingly passively accepting wife to boot. One less book to put back in the bookcase!

[Aaron France · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great stories, most are strong. Standing out above all others is "The Janitor from Mars".

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Features The Janitor From Mars wherein an abusive Martian robot communicates to a representative gathering of Earthlings precisely how little they matter in the grand scheme of things.

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

... but the title story gets five stars ...

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

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

[Ance Zveja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ir grāmatas, kuras es nemāku
Te bija interesanti stāsti - apkopējs uz Marsa bija lieliski citpasaulīgs, bagātie dzejas producenti amizanti, bet tas arī viss.

[Tim O'Leary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Back cover: A New York Times Notable Book..."Amis applies his comic timing, his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time." Like compulsive masturbation in the short "Let Me Count the Times." A burning issue to be sure. Horrible. In fact, much of the book is similarly styled with pretentiously elaborate portrayals of narcisistic indulgence by characters who are not the least-bit likable; dwelling completely in their self-absorbed poseurs' realm of pompous sophistication and snobbery; many of them extensions of the inside world (Amis's world) of publishers, agents, minders and handlers for writers who are either trending upwards, or on their downward slide out, or wannabes put-off indefinitely with negligible courtesy, or consideration, being denied admission to these circles entirely. As if all this solipsistic droning isn't already off-putting enough as failed sarcasm, Amis pretends to amuse the reader with name games in "Career Move" and "Straight Fiction" while, in turn, bludgeoning one to blood beyond tears with a blathering of astrophysical absurdity ad nauseum spewing cosmological timelines of the "ultraverse" punctuated with low-style profanities (by a robot, no less) addressing a most-esteemed audience of emissaries from Earth (including Miss World) in "The Janitor on Mars." Finally, in "What Happened to Me on My Holiday" Amis intones a death-by-the-old-world-extraction using the most-hackneyed forced inflection, to whit: "Bud virzd I'd bedder zay: don'd banig! I'm nad zuvvering vram brain damage--or vram adenoids. And I gan wride bedder than thiz when I wand do. Bud I don't wand do. Nad vor now. Led me egsblain." This continues unmercifully as the narrator regails us, further, about his parents of English and "Amerigan" origin and how they/he "zbeeg divverendly" and how English to his grandfather was the "more najural voize."
This was the last story (term used loosely) and, fittingly, the last straw. Couldn't continue to indulge this nonsense further. The Wall Street Journal (top-line front cover acclaim also in italics) calls Amis a "stone-solid genius." (!?!) If you take your cues from the likes of Rupert Murdoch's WSJ for what to read, then you might also want to glean from the "most-respected" critical literary reviews the best prospects for padding your equities portfolio. And good luck with that.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy Water and Other Stories is an interesting collection of stories written between the late 70s and late 90s. Martin Amis is able to draw readers into nine very different worlds that he has separated by time, place and genre.

'State of England' introduces us to early 90s Mal, who's adjusting to life back in England after spending time in Los Angeles and having recently left his wife for another woman. 'Heavy Water' tells the story of John, an intellectually disabled man, who has taken a Mediterranean cruise with his mother. 'The Janitor on Mars' is a reminder of how unimportant humanity is, in the grand scheme of things, but how that, in turn, should give us reason to be more mindful and caring of those around us- particularly the most vulnerable.

Although both 'Career Move' and 'Straight Fiction' are interesting enough in their own right, publishing them in the same collection is a mistake. Both stories use the same central device- swapping two established perspectives to help readers explore how the other half lives. In 'Career Move' poets become highly paid, fast living purveyors of pop culture, while screen play writers dedicate time to their art as they scratch out a living by other means. Similarly 'Straight Fiction' inverts the gay/straight gaze, placing heterosexual people on the margins of society and forcing them to confront the challenges regularly faced by the queer community. The former is a bit of fun, the latter is a much needed social mirror.

Overall, this is a collection well worth reading. It's something you can do between other things.

[David Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection from a writer better known for his novels and non-fiction works. I liked it better than his only other short story volume, the readable but doom laden nuclear-apocalypse-or-threat-of-it-themed Einstein's Monsters. Most of the stories in Heavy Water originally appeared in magazines and so Amis had to make them tightly-written and lucid. The title story is absolutely harrowing - it deals with what was in the 1970s, the time of writing, something of a taboo topic: a mentally retarded/deaf mute man and how his ageing mother takes care of him. She takes him on a cruise and Amis brilliantly poses the tacky on-board entertainments against his mother's ongoing care and their interactions. Several of the stories are satirical and Amis cleverly directly reverses a couple of realities of our world to make comment on the real, un-inverted world. In one story, The Janitor on Mars, Amis goes all cosmic with a robot from Mars telling earthlings about the reality of the universe. I don't understand why he felt the need to combine this brilliant hyper-science fiction narrative with one about the goings-on in a sleazy boys' home - it would have been better without that. Overall an impressive, vivid set of stories but I just couldn't read the final one - What Happened to Me on my Holiday - because of the narrator's impenetrable accent.

[Joel Gallant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin Amis is a virtuoso, but in “Heavy Water,” his highly uneven collection of nine short stories, virtuosity is sometimes all you get. A world in which screenwriters struggle to be published in small literary magazines read by no one, while poets fly around the world in first class, making lucrative deals with publishers—mildly clever and amusing. A world in which the majority of the world is gay, and straight people live secret lives to avoid persecution—a little obvious. There are a few gems, including “What Happened to Me on My Holiday,” a moving story (once you get past the alternate spelling mimicking a regional accent) of a child’s discovery of death and grief, or “The State of England,” a powerful story about class and family.

[Sylvie Tauriac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavy water raconte l'emprise d'une mère sur son fils en évoquant une habitude fréquente dans les îles anglo-saxonnes. Les gens ajoutaient du gin dans le biberon des enfants pour les calmer avec tous les effets secondaires que l'on peut imaginer. Cette habitude datait du 18ème siècle quand les hommes étaient inconscients des dégâts de l'alcool sur la santé humaine. Dans cette nouvelle, la mère maintient son hégémonie sur un fils devenu débile ; l'histoire est assez effrayante et la chute finale est remarquable. Martin Amis est un très grand auteur de nouvelles.

[Michel Guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever, no doubt, but I found the collection a bit disappointing. "Career Move" can be nicely cruel at times, and sounds like the author was settling old scores. As for "State of England", I could not understand the consideration enjoyed by this story. To be fully honest, I must add I read it in the French translation of Jean-Michel Rabaté, who makes too much use of old-fashioned French slang.
Years ago, I was a fan of Kingsley Amis and I realize I should have started reading Martin's works by choosing another title.