By Martin Amis
A riotous, bitingly humorous, and supremely smart novel from one among our such a lot particular voices within the English language.
The 12 months is 1970, and Keith Nearing, a twenty-year-old literature pupil, is spending his summer season holiday in a fort on a mountainside in Italy. The Sexual Revolution is in full-swing—a old second of remarkable opportunity—and Keith and his neighbors are instantly stuck up in its chaotic, ecstatic throes. but they quickly find a anxious fact: among the loss of life of 1 social order and the delivery of one other, there exists a kingdom of liminal purgatory, as soon as defined via the Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen as “a pregnant widow.”
As Amis deftly explores the repercussions and effects of that one summer time, he provides us with an exact and poignant portrait of the freeing chances, and the haunting results, of switch. Expertly written and entire of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is Amis at his fearless best.
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The Pregnant Widow (Vintage International)
A riotous, bitingly humorous, and supremely shrewdpermanent novel from certainly one of our such a lot designated voices within the English language. The 12 months is 1970, and Keith Nearing, a twenty-year-old literature scholar, is spending his summer season holiday in a citadel on a mountainside in Italy. The Sexual Revolution is in full-swing—a old second of remarkable opportunity—and Keith and his pals are instantly stuck up in its chaotic, ecstatic throes.
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Extra info for The Pregnant Widow (Vintage International)
Example text
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. This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between.
It should be said that the Scheherazade section of Lily’s proposal, so far as Keith was concerned, was neither here nor there. Scheherazade, when he last saw her, around Christmas, was as usual the frowning philanthropist in flatties and spectacles; she did community service, and CND and VSO, and drove a van for Meals on Wheels; and she had a loose-limbed boyfriend called Timmy, who liked killing animals and playing the cello and going to church. But then Scheherazade awoke from troubled dreams.
With expanses of glass and neon-lit interiors—the very earliest semblances of the boutique sheen of the market state. In the window there, mannequins of caramelised brown plastic, one of them armless, one of them headless, arranged in attitudes of polite introduction, as if bidding you welcome to the female form. So the historical challenge was bluntly stated. The wooden Madonnas on the alleyway corners would eventually be usurped by the plastic ladies of modernity. Now something happened—something he had never seen before.