A review by frickative
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

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.