Koba the Dread: Laughter and the 20 Million
Martin Amis
(Talk Miramax Books)
It goes without saying–or it should–that we live in an age of celebrity. But in this age, one subset of the fame species has all but vanished from the cultural landscape: the literary celebrity. At the present moment, it could be argued that real literary celebrity is a fraternity of few (and a sorority of fewer), perhaps even of one. The one is Martin Amis, whose notoriety in the world of literature was assured at birth, but whose lasting fame has issued from an inspired 30-year career as a novelist, journalist, and now, two-time memoirist.
Koba the Dread, Amis’ latest memoir, centers only tangentially–though crucially–on the author and his father, focusing instead on a figure that cast a far more sinister shadow not only on the house of Amis, but over the entire world. The figure is Joseph Stalin, and the book is a passionate, measured argument against Soviet Communism.
Not exactly Remembrance of Things Past, then.
Though Stalin may seem an unlikely topic for a contemporary author to tackle (since he doesn’t exactly have a slew of defenders), Amis is after something more than a simple history lesson. Amis is saying, essentially, that not only is it no longer valid to wax nostalgic about what might have been, but it was never valid to begin with, and the movement to do so was self-deceit of the most damning sort, a defense of a “war against truth.” As he puts it, in one of dozens of perfectly clinching assertions, “The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republic was a lie. The revolution was a lie.” Pow!
If Koba the Dread was solely a list of the atrocities Stalin committed against his own people (and therefore humanity), the book might still be a worthy reminder, and a perhaps noble (or perhaps pious) demonstration of Amis’ beautifully motivated prose. Since his mid-1980s “nuclear period,” when the terror of mutually assured destruction dominated the conscience of his novels and short stories (particularly Einstein’s Monsters, his weakest collection), Amis has learned how to incorporate moral outrage into his writing, without sacrificing the irreverent rhetorical dazzle of increment and repetition that defines his style.