Martin Amis

a novel

The zone of interest

Tillie

“I find it helps a bit', she said, 'with the smell." 

That last word was still on her tongue when we heard something, something borne on the wind... It was a helpless, quavering chord, a fugal harmony of human horror and dismay.

I feel that if you knew every day, every hour, every minute of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.

..ended with the words, “We shall not die now, the history of our nation will immortalise us, our initiative and spirit are alive and flourishing...”

l am no longer afraid of death, though I am still afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying because it is going to hurt. That's all there is attaching me to life: the fact that leaving it is going to hurt. It'll hurt.

The war was finally coming home to the place where it started - coming home to the Wilhelmstrasse.

..they all yelled, they all hollered fit to kill. And I vaguely and confusedly wondered if the story of National Socialism could have unfolded in any other language…

The second thrust was delivered to justify the first. The third to justify the second. And so it goes on, until the end of strength.

I procured a car, a filthy old Tornax (whose blackened and oft-needed crank kept making me think of a broken swastika), and boldly drove south-east. My purpose? My purpose was to get closer to the end of hope to exhaust it, and so try to be rid of it.

Earlier I said that you couldn't live through the Third Germany without discovering who you were, more or less (always a revelation, and often untoward); and without discovering who others were, too.

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