I Like It Here by glorious Kingsley Amis could make you do this - http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world 10 out of 10

 I Like It Here by glorious Kingsley Amis could make you do this - http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world

10 out of 10

 

 

This could be the thirteenth novel by Kingsley Amis that I read and exulted in and I am looking forward to passing thirty, Alhamdulillah, this Magister Ludi has been a prolific and inspired author, his Lucky Jim is one of The All-TIME 100 Novels http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/all/  and is also included on the Ninety Nine Novels list of Anthony Burgess (who is reported to have been a kind critic in the phenomenal Belles Lettres Papers), along with The Anti-Death League, Amis Senior has won the prestigious Booker Prize, and has been named the best comedy writer of the last half of the twentieth century…

 

I Like It Here – I could say that again and again, when talking about the worlds created by Kingsley Amis, and thinking of the Umberto Eco quote, regarding the five thousand lives that a reader experiences, against the only one of the individual who does not read, the books of Master Kingsley dispatch the readers to some of the most fabulous Edens we could – actually we could not, he does – imagine

This is an autobiographical novel, using the experience of the author, who had spent time in Portugal, to fulfill the conditions for his Somerset Maugham Award – he refers to the divine (this is my view, I do not know about Kingsley Amis) Maugham, a couple of times, the room had the Maugham look, the Far East, not the Riviera subdivision, something like that, I hope – and he might have shared with his main character a fear of the abroad, a reluctance to leave Here aka Britain and venture in the unknown.

 

One of the ways we enthuse in great writing is by identifying with the protagonist, recognizing the pleasures he describes, or the pains as having been our own – Proust might be the best in describing the joy and elation felt when he finds that what the novelist reveals is something he had felt or thought and it is so similar they share a unique moment, a fantastic connection is created and he is so proud…this is more probably something I experienced and I remember reading about in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/10/albertine-disparue-by-marcel-proust.html

Thus, I share the apprehension, the reluctance to get abroad, only it does not focus on Portugal, I have been there and enjoyed it – I think, for this was a tumultuous period, when sex was almost always on my mind and the scenery, people, tramways and everything else with few exceptions have gone missing –but I would give a miss to a new trip to Egypt and such places where there is an overwhelming bustle, a sense of havoc and lack of space, the continuous, aggressive push for sales and apparent mocking of foreigners, at least this was the experience of a trip taken in the middle of the nineties…

 

Garet Bowen is called Garnett by his mother-in-law –‘Mother- in-law what law says she's my mum’ – is the alter ego of Kingsley Amis – the mother-in-law experience is another one that offers similarities, albeit in my case, it would not reach the stage of legal consecration, for I had had an affair, maybe a fling as seen from the other side, with Miss Romania, sometime in the same nineties, only her mother opposed the union and therefore it would not happen, albeit we could be sure that the woman (the younger) was not all that convinced she wants to become the better half, or else when would have gone against the parental interdiction, after all, she had chosen me for some months, knowing full well this was anathema, for she introduced me as a platonic friend, clearly she would have said he is gay in another context and maybe she did and that is why the Leo would come to my place enraged and thirsty for blood, when  she would eventually find that the precious offspring was staying with me…

Bowen agrees with the successful publisher Bennie Hyman to try and trace a mysterious author, Wulfstan Strether, for some money and the chance to write an article…the writer that had managed to keep his identity secret had just sent a manuscript and the publishers need to assess the authenticity, they nicknamed him Buckmaster, apparently inspired by looking at a sex shop, or an outfit selling underwear and intimate items anyway…the hero would travel to the house of the man who pretends to be Strether, with his wife and three children in the first place, and then, towards the end of his stay in Portugal, Bowen would become the guest of the author or his shadow, with some amusing results.

 

A few incidents would add color and mirth, though for the hero, maybe anti-hero as well, it is a strain, for one of the aspects he dislikes about abroad (which he comes to enjoy so much, that he would be determined to repeat the experience as soon as possible and take the spouse for a trip next year, again) is the difference from the other countries and the Here in the title (he Likes It Here, remember) which is explained in the classic of psychology Influence by Robert Cialdini, among other masterpieces http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/05/influence-by-robert-cialdini.html - this is where we find about the principles of Influence and one that is affecting Bowen aka Kingsley would be Social Proof.

The alleged famous author is visited by a middle aged man accompanied by a sensual beauty, and the nervous host demands that Bowen takes the woman for a drink, so that he can a have a talk with the other guest and it looks for a while as if our friend will have sex with the gorgeous unknown, the way things progress, until he is…bitten by a hornet and the so far inevitable progress is stopped, then somewhat remorsefully, the man thinks of his spouse, who is by now back in Britain, because her mother had fallen in.

 

This experience and a scandal between Buckmaster or the man claiming to be him and his driver would help solve the mystery, all helped by something the fraud or the genuine author says at the tomb of Henry Fielding, where the classic is praised, but nonetheless we hear that he cannot be placed next to the colossus of the twentieth century (something of the kind, I do not put here the exact words) and this would help solve the enigma and we hear that it is the authentic Strether, it could not be otherwise…

 

Some other favorite quotes – ‘Bowen had nothing against Graham Greene, but wished he would die soon, so that his lecture on him would not keep on having to have things added to his lecture every eighteen months or so...with a new book out…A couple of months abroad would be like making a determined start on Finnegan’s Wake, an experience bound in itself to be arduous and irritating, but one which could conceivably render available a rich variety of further experiences…’

Going to bed with her was fun, as if the Iliad or some other grueling cultural monument had turned out to be a good read as well as a masterpiece…

“Bowen thought about Fielding…Perhaps it was worth dying in your forties if two hundred years later you were the only non-contemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and whole-hearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologized for or excused on grounds of changing taste…And how enviable to live in the world of his novels, where duty was plain, evil arose out of malevolence and a starving wayfarer could be invited indoors without fear…Did that make it a simplified world…Perhaps, but that hardly mattered beside the existence of a moral seriousness that could be made apparent without evangelical puffing and huffing’