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lola425's review against another edition
3.0
The feminst in me knows that I should look upon authors like Amis and his ilk with some measure of disdain. And yet...I cannot resist a well-written story. I reserve the right to disdain, but right now I'm enjoying it.
As expected, Amis' main character followed his d***, and it led him nowhere good.
As expected, Amis' main character followed his d***, and it led him nowhere good.
sarah1984's review against another edition
4/10 - Oh dear! At 3.01, this has a dreadful average rating that's giving me premonitions of it being a DNFer. This is the problem with not having a smart phone with the GR app on it. To be continued...
Later - I'm having trouble making any sense of this book.
For example, why does Amis insert a lesson in etymology into a sentence every often? On page 25, why do we need to know that 'Desolate' is from L. Desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'? Who inserts that into a sentence for no obvious reason?
This paragraph on page 27-28 completely baffled me and is actually what sent me running to the journal so I wouldn't lose the energy and urge to write that's been brought about by that confusion.
"Keith was assuming social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous, and the citadel they occupied seemed partly fabulous, and the transformation of Scheherazade seemed partly fabulous. Where was social realism? The upper classes themselves, he kept thinking, were not social realists. Their modus operandi, their way of operating, obeyed looser rules. He was, ominously, a K in a castle. But he was still assuming that social realism would hold. What does he mean by partly fabulous, and what does K in a castle mean?
Then there's page eight, which is four lines away from being a full page contemplation of women's measurements. Now, correct me if I'm wrong because despite being a girl myself I'm hardly an expert, but isn't it true that the narrowest part of a woman's torso is her waist. No matter if she's an or a 28, her waist will always be narrower than her hips or chest. If that is true how on earth can measurements like 35-45-55 or 46-47-31 be possible, or something a boy in 'early adolescence' would fantasise about?
After 30 pages I think I've spent about enough time on this sex-driven mess of a story. I've only got a few weeks before I leave for three weeks in France and a lot of books to read before I go most (if not all) of which I won't be able to take due to due dates occurring while I'm away. So, a book's got to be reasonable for me to spend precious time on it, and this was far from it. Such a low average rating, immediate evidence of the reasons given for that low average rating and my own personal confusion have lead to this being a great big NOPE.
Later - I'm having trouble making any sense of this book.
For example, why does Amis insert a lesson in etymology into a sentence every often? On page 25, why do we need to know that 'Desolate' is from L. Desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'? Who inserts that into a sentence for no obvious reason?
This paragraph on page 27-28 completely baffled me and is actually what sent me running to the journal so I wouldn't lose the energy and urge to write that's been brought about by that confusion.
"Keith was assuming social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous, and the citadel they occupied seemed partly fabulous, and the transformation of Scheherazade seemed partly fabulous. Where was social realism? The upper classes themselves, he kept thinking, were not social realists. Their modus operandi, their way of operating, obeyed looser rules. He was, ominously, a K in a castle. But he was still assuming that social realism would hold. What does he mean by partly fabulous, and what does K in a castle mean?
Then there's page eight, which is four lines away from being a full page contemplation of women's measurements. Now, correct me if I'm wrong because despite being a girl myself I'm hardly an expert, but isn't it true that the narrowest part of a woman's torso is her waist. No matter if she's an or a 28, her waist will always be narrower than her hips or chest. If that is true how on earth can measurements like 35-45-55 or 46-47-31 be possible, or something a boy in 'early adolescence' would fantasise about?
After 30 pages I think I've spent about enough time on this sex-driven mess of a story. I've only got a few weeks before I leave for three weeks in France and a lot of books to read before I go most (if not all) of which I won't be able to take due to due dates occurring while I'm away. So, a book's got to be reasonable for me to spend precious time on it, and this was far from it. Such a low average rating, immediate evidence of the reasons given for that low average rating and my own personal confusion have lead to this being a great big NOPE.
janebranson's review against another edition
1.0
Whatever one star stands for (the Goodreads mobile app won't let me see) it's one too many (but Goodreads doesn't allow nil stars). Admittedly I only read the first 50 pages but that represents a considerable effort and, frankly, life's too short to read another line. Another reviewer summed it up nicely with some choice language, but I shall have to restrain myself because I am Goodreads-friends with my children. Suffice it to say, I had to create a new 'unfinishable' shelf.
borislimpopo's review against another edition
4.0
Amis, Martin (2010). The Pregnant Widow. London: Jonathan Cape. 2010.
A me Martin Amis piace tantissimo, fondamentalmente per la sua cattiveria e il suo sarcasmo. Non sempre, però, sa mantenersi all’ottimo livello cui ci hanno abituati romanzi come London Fields (il suo capolavoro, a parer mio) e in questi casi capita di restare un po’ delusi, alla fin fine.
Penso di avere letto tutte, o quasi, le opere che ha pubblicato in volume (ho fatto un rapido controlo su Wikipedia: mi sa che ho letto proprio tutto!), ma su questo blog ho recensito soltanto una raccolta di saggi, The Second Plane.
Al proposito, va detto che Amis scrive, molto spesso, saggi (forse è più appropriato usare, come in inglese, semplicemente il negativo: non-fiction), e con opinioni appassionatamente e polemicamente sostenute, spesso al limite del paradosso (e senza paura di cambiare drasticamente opinione, dal timore/terrore militante dell’annichilamento atomico della gioventù all’esplicito sostegno all’avventura militare irachenapiù di recente, pur restando sempre morbosamente affascinato dalle figure – Saddam o Stalin – in cui si incarna il male, che tende sempre a percepire e descrivere come assoluto), in genere fortemente controverse, fino allo scandalo sulla scena letteraria britannica. In questo modo, il confine tra non-fiction con grandi capacità letterarie e fiction ricca di opinioni e osservazioni di costume tende a sfumarsi.
Mi sembra – e non sono il solo a dirlo – che con questo romanzo Amis torni ai fasti della trilogia londinese (Money, London Fields, The Information) dopo alcune prove piuttosto opache. Ancora di più, non fosse che per motivi anagrafici, The Pregnant Widow ci riporta ai tempi e ai temi del romanzo di debutto di Amis, The Rachel Papers, in cui Amis ci aveva fatto incontrare il suo alter ego Charles Highway, brillante e narcisistico teenager che seguiamo a Londra nell’estate precedente il suo ingresso a Oxford, cui è ovviamente predestinato per censo e cultura prima che per qualità intrinseche.
In The Pregnant Widow siamo nell’estate del 1970. L’alter ego dell’autore si chiama questa volta Keith Nearing e Amis non nasconde gli intenti autobiografici in modo insieme sarcastico e spavaldo:
Everything that follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true (Rita is true, Adriano, incredibly, is true). Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent. Or else all of them were innocent – but cannot be protected. [p. 4]
Con la medesima programmatica spavalderia, a epigrafe del libro è riportata la definizione di narcisismo del Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
Al di là della storia, a volte toccante, a volte grottesca, il romanzo è percorso dalla sensazione che quegli anni fossero un crocevia della storia – anni rivoluzionari, ma la rivoluzione era la rivoluzione sessuale, come ha raccontato anche Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers – I sognatori – e che gli adolescenti di allora (Keith è alla vigilia del suo 21esimo compleanno) ne siano stati più le vittime che gli eroi.
Io ho qualche anno meno di Amis e del suo protagonista, e certamente (ancorché in molte dimensioni un privilegiato anch’io) ero piuttosto distante culturalmente e socialmente da quell’élite cui appartengono Keith Nearing e le sue amiche. Eppure, il romanzo ha toccato in me corde diverse, anche se non necessariamente più profonde, di quelle solite: ho sentito vivissima quella specie di inquietudine piena di attese e di ansie che mi accompagnavano alle feste e agli incontri con ragazze “nuove”, la distanza tra il mio mondo interiore e quello che riuscivo a trasmettere all’esterno (e che mi sembrava, e probabilmente era, paurosamente inadeguato). Ho rivissuto in Keith la capacità narcisistica di produrre affabulazioni ai limiti dell’autoinganno e cui volevo disperatamente credere. E condivido il punto di vista di Keith (il cui io narrante ripercorre quell’estate 40 anni dopo) e probabilmente dello stesso Amis che alcune settimane e alcuni mesi di quegli anni di formazione ci hanno poi accompagnato e segnato per sempre, sono stati momenti fondanti del nostro personale Bildungsroman.
A me, per esempio, l’atmosfera del “castello” in Campania ha ricordato un inizio di settembre, mi pare fosse il 1969, in cui attraverso amici di amici (o più esattamente amici dei figli di amici di mio padre) avevo incontrato una biondissima e bellissima sedicenne, figlia di professionisti napoletani, con spettacolare villa sulla costa tra Sperlonga e Gaeta. Il fatto che i genitori la lasciassero sola nella villa durante la settimana (OK, con una persona di servitù), e che quindi noi ragazzi fossimo soli sulla spiaggia e nella casa, aveva profondamente sconvolto le mie fantasie (non che se ne fosse accorto nessuno, spero). Se chiudo gli occhi rivedo la peluria dorata che aveva sulla nuca e sulle braccia abbronzate. Per me era Nausicaa in bikini e pareo, punto e basta.
La vedova incinta del titolo è un riferimento al rivoluzionario russo Alexander Herzen, e a un’espressione coniata nel suo Dall’altra sponda (Milano: Adelphi, 1993):
The title is borrowed from Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century Russian thinker. “The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” Herzen wrote. “Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of another, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.” [Alex Bilmes, ""Martin Amis: 'Women have got too much power for their own good' ", The Telegraph, 2 febbraio 2010]
Il libro è da leggere, se conoscete già Martin Amis. Se non lo conoscete, vi suggerisco di non cominciare da qui, ma (forse) dalla trilogia londinese. Qui di seguito, comunque, qualche assaggio.
* * *
Nicholas, when he was coming of age in the mid-1960s, found himself involved in a series of long, boring, repetitve, and in fact completely circular arguments with his father. [...]
The circular arguments were ostensibly about various limits to be imposed on Nicholas’s Freedom and independence. In fact they were about sex before marriage. But there was never any mention of sex before marriage (rendering the arguments circular). And this was Professor Karl Shackleton, sociologist, positivist, progressivist. Karl was all those things – but he hadn’t had sex before marriage. And, looking back, he liked the idea of having sex before marriage. We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women.
[...] It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And envy, the dictionary suggest, takes us by a knight’s move to empathy. From L. invidere ‘regard maliciously’, from in- ‘into’ + videre ‘to see’. Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy at the wrong place in the wrong time. [pp. 112-113]
[Keith e Lily discutono Jane Austen]
‘Catherine Morland has big tits. Jane Austen more or less tells you that. It’s in code. See, Lydia’s the tallest and youngest sister – and she’s stout. That’s code for a big arse.’
‘And what’s the code for big tits?’
‘Consequence. When Catherine’s growing up she gets plumper and her figure gains consequence. Consequence – that’s code for big tits.’ [p. 158]
There used to be the class system, and the race system, and the sex system. the three systems are gone or going. And now we have the age system.
Those between twenty-eight and thirty-five, ideally fresh, are the super-elite, the tsars and tsarinas; those between eighteen and twenty-eight, plus those between thirty-five and forty-five, are the boyars, the nobles; all the others under sixty comprise the bourgeoisie; everybody between sixty and seventy represents the proletariat, the hoi polloi; and those even older than that are the serfs and the wraiths of slaves.
Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers9. And we will be hated too. Governance, for at least a generation, Keith read, will be a matter of trasferring wealth fron the young to the old. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing… [p. 230]
You know, it’s not the rich who’re really different from us. It’s the beautiful. [p. 244]
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘Love story. The one we hated. Remember? Hysterical sex means never having to say you’re sorry.’
[...] The truth of it being that love meant always having to say you’re sorry. [p. 244]
What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, you greet what comes (p. 381]
Death – the dark backing a mirror needs before it can show us ourselves. [p. 462]
A me Martin Amis piace tantissimo, fondamentalmente per la sua cattiveria e il suo sarcasmo. Non sempre, però, sa mantenersi all’ottimo livello cui ci hanno abituati romanzi come London Fields (il suo capolavoro, a parer mio) e in questi casi capita di restare un po’ delusi, alla fin fine.
Penso di avere letto tutte, o quasi, le opere che ha pubblicato in volume (ho fatto un rapido controlo su Wikipedia: mi sa che ho letto proprio tutto!), ma su questo blog ho recensito soltanto una raccolta di saggi, The Second Plane.
Al proposito, va detto che Amis scrive, molto spesso, saggi (forse è più appropriato usare, come in inglese, semplicemente il negativo: non-fiction), e con opinioni appassionatamente e polemicamente sostenute, spesso al limite del paradosso (e senza paura di cambiare drasticamente opinione, dal timore/terrore militante dell’annichilamento atomico della gioventù all’esplicito sostegno all’avventura militare irachenapiù di recente, pur restando sempre morbosamente affascinato dalle figure – Saddam o Stalin – in cui si incarna il male, che tende sempre a percepire e descrivere come assoluto), in genere fortemente controverse, fino allo scandalo sulla scena letteraria britannica. In questo modo, il confine tra non-fiction con grandi capacità letterarie e fiction ricca di opinioni e osservazioni di costume tende a sfumarsi.
Mi sembra – e non sono il solo a dirlo – che con questo romanzo Amis torni ai fasti della trilogia londinese (Money, London Fields, The Information) dopo alcune prove piuttosto opache. Ancora di più, non fosse che per motivi anagrafici, The Pregnant Widow ci riporta ai tempi e ai temi del romanzo di debutto di Amis, The Rachel Papers, in cui Amis ci aveva fatto incontrare il suo alter ego Charles Highway, brillante e narcisistico teenager che seguiamo a Londra nell’estate precedente il suo ingresso a Oxford, cui è ovviamente predestinato per censo e cultura prima che per qualità intrinseche.
In The Pregnant Widow siamo nell’estate del 1970. L’alter ego dell’autore si chiama questa volta Keith Nearing e Amis non nasconde gli intenti autobiografici in modo insieme sarcastico e spavaldo:
Everything that follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true (Rita is true, Adriano, incredibly, is true). Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent. Or else all of them were innocent – but cannot be protected. [p. 4]
Con la medesima programmatica spavalderia, a epigrafe del libro è riportata la definizione di narcisismo del Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
Al di là della storia, a volte toccante, a volte grottesca, il romanzo è percorso dalla sensazione che quegli anni fossero un crocevia della storia – anni rivoluzionari, ma la rivoluzione era la rivoluzione sessuale, come ha raccontato anche Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers – I sognatori – e che gli adolescenti di allora (Keith è alla vigilia del suo 21esimo compleanno) ne siano stati più le vittime che gli eroi.
Io ho qualche anno meno di Amis e del suo protagonista, e certamente (ancorché in molte dimensioni un privilegiato anch’io) ero piuttosto distante culturalmente e socialmente da quell’élite cui appartengono Keith Nearing e le sue amiche. Eppure, il romanzo ha toccato in me corde diverse, anche se non necessariamente più profonde, di quelle solite: ho sentito vivissima quella specie di inquietudine piena di attese e di ansie che mi accompagnavano alle feste e agli incontri con ragazze “nuove”, la distanza tra il mio mondo interiore e quello che riuscivo a trasmettere all’esterno (e che mi sembrava, e probabilmente era, paurosamente inadeguato). Ho rivissuto in Keith la capacità narcisistica di produrre affabulazioni ai limiti dell’autoinganno e cui volevo disperatamente credere. E condivido il punto di vista di Keith (il cui io narrante ripercorre quell’estate 40 anni dopo) e probabilmente dello stesso Amis che alcune settimane e alcuni mesi di quegli anni di formazione ci hanno poi accompagnato e segnato per sempre, sono stati momenti fondanti del nostro personale Bildungsroman.
A me, per esempio, l’atmosfera del “castello” in Campania ha ricordato un inizio di settembre, mi pare fosse il 1969, in cui attraverso amici di amici (o più esattamente amici dei figli di amici di mio padre) avevo incontrato una biondissima e bellissima sedicenne, figlia di professionisti napoletani, con spettacolare villa sulla costa tra Sperlonga e Gaeta. Il fatto che i genitori la lasciassero sola nella villa durante la settimana (OK, con una persona di servitù), e che quindi noi ragazzi fossimo soli sulla spiaggia e nella casa, aveva profondamente sconvolto le mie fantasie (non che se ne fosse accorto nessuno, spero). Se chiudo gli occhi rivedo la peluria dorata che aveva sulla nuca e sulle braccia abbronzate. Per me era Nausicaa in bikini e pareo, punto e basta.
La vedova incinta del titolo è un riferimento al rivoluzionario russo Alexander Herzen, e a un’espressione coniata nel suo Dall’altra sponda (Milano: Adelphi, 1993):
The title is borrowed from Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century Russian thinker. “The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” Herzen wrote. “Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of another, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.” [Alex Bilmes, ""Martin Amis: 'Women have got too much power for their own good' ", The Telegraph, 2 febbraio 2010]
Il libro è da leggere, se conoscete già Martin Amis. Se non lo conoscete, vi suggerisco di non cominciare da qui, ma (forse) dalla trilogia londinese. Qui di seguito, comunque, qualche assaggio.
* * *
Nicholas, when he was coming of age in the mid-1960s, found himself involved in a series of long, boring, repetitve, and in fact completely circular arguments with his father. [...]
The circular arguments were ostensibly about various limits to be imposed on Nicholas’s Freedom and independence. In fact they were about sex before marriage. But there was never any mention of sex before marriage (rendering the arguments circular). And this was Professor Karl Shackleton, sociologist, positivist, progressivist. Karl was all those things – but he hadn’t had sex before marriage. And, looking back, he liked the idea of having sex before marriage. We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women.
[...] It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And envy, the dictionary suggest, takes us by a knight’s move to empathy. From L. invidere ‘regard maliciously’, from in- ‘into’ + videre ‘to see’. Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy at the wrong place in the wrong time. [pp. 112-113]
[Keith e Lily discutono Jane Austen]
‘Catherine Morland has big tits. Jane Austen more or less tells you that. It’s in code. See, Lydia’s the tallest and youngest sister – and she’s stout. That’s code for a big arse.’
‘And what’s the code for big tits?’
‘Consequence. When Catherine’s growing up she gets plumper and her figure gains consequence. Consequence – that’s code for big tits.’ [p. 158]
There used to be the class system, and the race system, and the sex system. the three systems are gone or going. And now we have the age system.
Those between twenty-eight and thirty-five, ideally fresh, are the super-elite, the tsars and tsarinas; those between eighteen and twenty-eight, plus those between thirty-five and forty-five, are the boyars, the nobles; all the others under sixty comprise the bourgeoisie; everybody between sixty and seventy represents the proletariat, the hoi polloi; and those even older than that are the serfs and the wraiths of slaves.
Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers9. And we will be hated too. Governance, for at least a generation, Keith read, will be a matter of trasferring wealth fron the young to the old. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing… [p. 230]
You know, it’s not the rich who’re really different from us. It’s the beautiful. [p. 244]
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘Love story. The one we hated. Remember? Hysterical sex means never having to say you’re sorry.’
[...] The truth of it being that love meant always having to say you’re sorry. [p. 244]
What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, you greet what comes (p. 381]
Death – the dark backing a mirror needs before it can show us ourselves. [p. 462]
haudurn's review against another edition
2.0
Hardly as good as his earlier stuff. Reminds me of Wolfe's 'I am Charlotte Simmons' simply because it is as though the author can only be a dirty old man with no new insights.
snixo048's review against another edition
3.0
It wasn't bad, but it isn't a storyt hat particularly stood out this year. The characters are a little self indulgent, allthough the story itself is good.
frickative's review against another edition
1.0
I'm hopeful that The Pregnant Widow will be the worst book I read in 2014. It surely can't get more abysmal than this dire affair, that I only finished through sheer force of will. Our protagonist Keith, a posh twit who thinks far too much of himself, takes a summer's holiday to Italy with his girlfriend and other companions. He spends the whole holiday trying to get into other girls' knickers, and has a sexual encounter so epic it alters the course of his life. This summary doesn't really do the book justice, in that it sounds a lot more interesting than it actually is. This is a dry, dull, painfully long tome in which very little of interest happens for exceptionally long stretches. It's stuffed full of literary allusions that must have made Amis feel oh-so-clever but in actuality make it near unreadable in places. In case it's not obvious, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but an insomniac.
emscji's review against another edition
3.0
10/29/2012: I was stumped by this book. Confounded. But why, then, did I keep reading? It was a most frustrating experience; I kept thinking that Amis would say something to clarify his purpose, or to resolve his mysteries, or to align the elliptical asides that appeared every few chapters. But I ended where I began, with a "Wait, what?"
The man can write. And his characters, his scenes, his evocation of a time and place are arresting. Keith, Lily, Scheherezade, Adriano, Gloria, Violet--all seem to want to jump off the page. They are wonderfully and hilariously (and poignantly) drawn, as they bump and grind their way through a summer spent together in a castle in Italy, in 1970--the dawn of the Sexual Revolution. There is a pervasive nostalgia; the book is written from the present, looking back, from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, who reveals himself in the end, but who for all intents and purposes is omniscient, and has opinions about everything. Thus the poignancy, the sense that the wisdom of the old, while wonderful, can't ever beat the naive, foolish and hungry energy of youth. It is even possible to reconstruct the plot of the novel, to retell the story and get a hint at what Amis is driving at. But for over 400 pages I kept hoping that those hints would coalesce into a coherent, or at least poetically consistent, set of themes. And I'm still pondering.
I missed much of the British slang of the early 70s, the shorthand of the time and place. I also think I missed many of the literary references. And I should go search those out--it might make parts of the novel much clearer. But I don't have the energy for that. And I keep thinking that Amis--some of whose books I've enjoyed--suffers from two issues. The first is a severe case of self-indulgence (okay, inflated ego, maybe? but I won't go that far); he has clearly made it this far and can write whatever and however he wants, and he has chosen to write an elliptical, elusive, archly nostalgic novel. Okay…he can do that. The second problem? Ah, I've said THIS before. The book needs a GOOD EDITOR. Did I mention the over 400 pages…?
Take me back to social realism, please…!
The man can write. And his characters, his scenes, his evocation of a time and place are arresting. Keith, Lily, Scheherezade, Adriano, Gloria, Violet--all seem to want to jump off the page. They are wonderfully and hilariously (and poignantly) drawn, as they bump and grind their way through a summer spent together in a castle in Italy, in 1970--the dawn of the Sexual Revolution. There is a pervasive nostalgia; the book is written from the present, looking back, from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, who reveals himself in the end, but who for all intents and purposes is omniscient, and has opinions about everything. Thus the poignancy, the sense that the wisdom of the old, while wonderful, can't ever beat the naive, foolish and hungry energy of youth. It is even possible to reconstruct the plot of the novel, to retell the story and get a hint at what Amis is driving at. But for over 400 pages I kept hoping that those hints would coalesce into a coherent, or at least poetically consistent, set of themes. And I'm still pondering.
I missed much of the British slang of the early 70s, the shorthand of the time and place. I also think I missed many of the literary references. And I should go search those out--it might make parts of the novel much clearer. But I don't have the energy for that. And I keep thinking that Amis--some of whose books I've enjoyed--suffers from two issues. The first is a severe case of self-indulgence (okay, inflated ego, maybe? but I won't go that far); he has clearly made it this far and can write whatever and however he wants, and he has chosen to write an elliptical, elusive, archly nostalgic novel. Okay…he can do that. The second problem? Ah, I've said THIS before. The book needs a GOOD EDITOR. Did I mention the over 400 pages…?
Take me back to social realism, please…!
deleukenikki's review against another edition
1.0
Didn't make it past 250 pages. What a misogynistic, self-indulgant drag.
mcf's review against another edition
5.0
More than wonderful. I'm a big fan of his, but Amis hasn't been this effortless, clever, or generous in years; an absolute pleasure to read. Endlessly gratifying and equally impressive.