I Like It Here by Kingsley Amis – The Magister Ludi is one of my favorite authors, I have read and enjoyed I Like It Here for the second time now – you have reviews on more than twenty books by this fantastic writer and thousands on works from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

I Like It Here by Kingsley Amis – The Magister Ludi is one of my favorite authors, I have read and enjoyed I Like It Here for the second time now – you have reviews on more than twenty books by this fantastic writer and thousands on works from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

10 out of 10

 

I am reading the magnum opera of Kingsley Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-kings-english-guide-to-modern-usage.html again, this time I try to use some method, while the first time there was no plan, order, now I am trying to approach the novels chronologically, in the order of their publishing

 

Garnet Bowen is the hero of this novel and I identify with him to a large extend, first of all, I also Like It Here – he prefers England, just like I have not left my town in what, maybe fifteen years, and even then, that was a two day trip, otherwise it is twenty years since a real outing, granted, between 2001 and 2004 we moved to Rosenau

There is an opportunity for Bowen, his wife, Barbara, and their children to take a holiday to Lisbon, where he would have some work to do as well, spying on the man who pretends to be a successful novelist, John Wulfstan Strether, and see if he really is who claims, or a fraud, ready to benefit financially and in other ways

 

I remember some aspects that thrilled me the first time https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/i-like-it-here-by-glorious-kingsley.html the manner in which he expected ‘a dance with ole’ then ‘He checked himself at the last possible moment from breaking wind; some part of his mind must have been reasoning that since he would be doing it in English she wouldn’t understand. “Sorry. As calças.” There are quite a few amusing scenes

Furthermore, we have a detective story inside, in the effort to expose the strange would be Strether, or confirm that he is the real artist, the proof is also mirthful – spoiler alert – this outré character says ‘much as I reverence this assured master of the picaresque, I am unable to consider him my equal’, ergo he is authentic

 

To be this vain, he has to be Stether…then we have the tiresome Charlie Oates, the landlord in Lisbon, who wants way too much money, and gets it, while offering much less than promised…there are astounding passages: In Bowen’s mental projection-theatre an exophthalmic hag with a knife of traditional Portuguese pattern was chasing him round and round Oates’s “garden”, for some reason at Chaplin-revival speed and with corresponding intensity of gesture’

‘Bowen sat down in the crackling basket-chair and picked up the new Graham Greene. He had nothing against that author either personally or aesthetically, but wished he would die soon so that his lecture on him would not keep on having to have things added to it every eighteen months or so…’

‘Then she looked at him with the kind of coldness that made him begin to be afraid she might suddenly start doing a dance for him, singing harshly and unintelligibly and with bags of stamping, hand-clapping and finger-clicking, even with a spot or two of the old olé.’ In conclusion, I think this is a chef d’oeuvre, just like all of the Kingsley Amis magnum opera

 

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