Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, author of more than twenty magnificent novels, such as Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/ending-up-by-kingsley-amis.html - 10 out of 10

 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, author of more than twenty magnificent novels, such as Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/ending-up-by-kingsley-amis.html

10 out of 10

 

 

I am so enthused by the magnum opera of the illustrious Kingsley Amis that I have started reading his novels again, albeit I have not yet reached ‘The End’, with about twenty works ‘finished’, there are more than ten, maybe fifteen delights still to ‘come’ – the orgiastic slang term is appropriate, to a large extent anyway – mixing the familiar with the new must, will be an extraordinary Shangri La, Arcadia on kindle, or in the form of an audio book http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/09/note-2-on-lost-horizon-by-james-hilton.html

 

On the first encounter with Lucky Jim http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/05/lucky-jim-by-kingsley-amis.html I was thanking an hypothetical God for Kingsley Amis, and indeed, five years on, and more than twenty masterpieces later (I hesitate sometimes when I place those labels, worried that you, a potential reader of these lines, might not see Stanley and The Women say, or other such marvelous volumes in the same light, but then this is what they are for me, spectacular frescoes, equal to anything else humans have created) I am still exuberant, ravished by the thought that I have more novels to read ahead, new ones, and then I will return to what has already been through my head once…

Alas, there are some issues here, on the one hand, it is good that some, most, oh God, all of some read texts has evaporated, since that means it will be (mostly) new to this reader – the fact that I know that Anna Karenina is dying at the end is incidentally a nuisance http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/04/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy.html when taking the novel now, for the second time, actually, I have started this before, and gave up on that ground, and at the thought that it is more than twenty hours of reading, one incentive is that Maggie Gylenhaal will be doing the reading

 

On the other hand, it is evidently worrying to see that the space, or the storage in the data center of the brain has been filled by the few thousands of books read – 3,507 according to Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7873218-realini or more precisely the items I have placed there, where I had been so proud to hold to the pole position for so many years, until this eejit came from nowhere, to cheat titanically, by claiming to have read hundreds of books a day, and then claiming as ‘reviews’ a few quotes copied from somewhere and passing me by a few more thousands of notes

Now, let me say something about Lucky Jim and Kingsley Amis, before I highjack the whole ‘review’ and eventually lead it to something that has been irritating me over the past few days, such the spouse, an eternal pain – take yesterday, which is archetypal, when she was very angry with this family that parks the cars near our fence, instead of at their house (they have other limousines already there, in their ‘defense’, since they had made a fortune by…fraud, they have been in the news for a scam in which they sold alleged disinfectant, where the solution was real active ingredient in a tiny percentage, diluted with water to the point where it is questionable if it had any effect at all, a big scandal ensued, making it into an Oscar nominated documentary) and when I said, yes, but I had told years before, that this other mother fucker is the one that had started it all, with seven or more vehicles abusing what is a gated community, for residence, which he misuses for his business…

 

Anyway, revenons a nos moutons, to say that Kingsley Amis is probably not celebrated to the extent he deserves because of the omnipresent humor in his chefs d’oeuvre, which cause critics and public to take him less seriously, I mean, yes, there are luminaries that have said he is ‘the best writer of comedy in the second half of the last century’…I put this as a quote, in spite of not finding who said it, surely in a different way, but Google corrects your mistake and gives back this is who, and how he phrased it; this time, I placed only Amis and the question and the returns came on his son, Martin Amis.

Which mean that with time, the father might enter a sort of forgetfulness, let us hope not obscurity and then oblivion, due in part to new trends which are worrying – the new cancel culture, and forms of progressive thinking, woke, will look at the divine Amis and emphasize the aspects of the heroes (Lucky Jim included) and reject what they see as male dominance, female chagrin, take the Margaret character and what happens to her, which I find amusing, at times hilarious, like other retrograde, passé readers, and new age public will take offence with ‘how could they mistreat the poor girl like that?’

 

Yes, she exaggerates, plays with Jim Dixon and other males, but that is as should be, the hero needs to stay with her, accept all her whims and lies…if she had pretended to be trying to kill herself, it was because of her fragility and mental issues and she needs to be pampered, cared for, forget about going off with Christine, the main character is ‘Lucky Jim’ as in he is on a mission to protect Margaret and stay with her forever, or ‘until parted by death, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health’, so there is no alternative, if she is just pretending, manipulating, abusive in her taking control of the man, it is her sacred right, after centuries of masculine rule and enslavement, Margaret has the divine right to Revenge.

We must cherish Lucky Jim, Stanley and The Women  http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/02/stanley-and-women-by-kingsley-amis-10.html and other such masterpieces as long as we can, Lucky You, you can still take on this magnum opus and laugh, before it is banned, or just ignored, not published, mentioned anymore, to the point where it is just as known as some obscure cleric, scribbling in a monastery of the Middle Ages ( I have watched a sometimes pathetic docucomedy series on Netflix, Cunk on Earth, where the protagonist claims to be naïve to the point of absurdity, and talks of the ‘darkages’, not The Dark Ages, which is itself a term on the way out, an expert tells her that this is not used now)

Kingsley Amis is as close to sainthood as possible for an atheist (or deist, agnostic, I am not sure what I am anymore, perhaps on the way to an epiphany, conversion, who knows) and he will provide bliss, Flow, for the years to come that will be illuminated, made funnier by the novels I have not read, or the ones I know, the stupendous works of art of the demigod Amis…I just realized another word to describe his magnum opera…orgiastic http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world