Take a Girl Like You by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis – he is my favorite author, along with Marcel Proust, Somerset Maugham, and I was going to say Take a Girl Like You is one of his best, except I would be wrong, I am enthused by all his magnum opera – indeed, there are about thirty notes on his novels and short stories, maybe even more, together with thousands of reviews on books from The Greatest Books of All Time and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

Take a Girl Like You by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis – he is my favorite author, along with Marcel Proust, Somerset Maugham, and I was going to say Take a Girl Like You is one of his best, except I would be wrong, I am enthused by all his magnum opera – indeed, there are about thirty notes on his novels and short stories, maybe even more, together with thousands of reviews on books from The Greatest Books of All Time and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

10 out of 10

 

I have read Take a Girl Like You https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/take-girl-like-you-by-kingsley-amis-one.html              a few years ago and was ecstatic, but then that is what happens when you read a novel or short story by the divine Kingsley Amis – this was his favorite and wrote that it was the only one…

 

He felt like writing a sequel to, and this would become Difficulties With Girls – here is a jocular moment, what about spoiler alerts for other books, I mean, we are not supposed to divulge what happens in the book under discussion, unless we warn the reader – as if people bother to go through these lines, which they don’t

In this case, I am talking about another chef d’oeuvre, and I should be free to vent my enthusiasm and ‘tell you the way it is’, in the manner of Chili Palmer from Get Shorty https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/get-shorty-written-by-scott-frank-based.html so there it is: the main characters get together

 

Which is unexpected, seeing what happens in TAGLY – in his Letters, Kingsley Amis refers to his favorite under this tag -between Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish, the protagonists, he is very attracted to her, and she is infatuated – maybe in love from one point on – with him, but there is palpable, eventually climactic tension

She is a virgin and he is a philanderer – I have identified with the hero, or is he an antihero? – who wants to have sex, nay, he has to, at one critical, pinnacle point he explains that she has to ‘surrender, the type of man she wants to marry has coitus, those who don’t, would not be interesting’, something to that effect and written with talent

 

Ergo, it is such a surprise to find that in Difficulties With Girls https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/12/difficulties-with-girls-by-magister.html they...marry, granted, he is still cheating on her, in other words, this is not turning into some romantic, incredible happy end narrative

The humor is exhilarating; here are some samples ‘She was wearing a dress of some soft dark green material which he had not seen on her before. It suited her, but then so would a fireman’s uniform or a 1910 bathing suit, complete with cap… More than that, she was looking at him with the look she used to indicate availability, which given her history was rather like an executioner with mask, tights and axe wearing a placard round his neck that said I KILL PEOPLE.’

 

In conclusion, I look forward to the next series: I will keep reading the Kingsley Amis magnum opera for the second (and then the third, Insha’Allah) time, this time in what may be a proper order, some years ago, I just took the novels at random, now I try to take them as they were published, not that they are connected in any way, they are all ‘An overmastering pleasure, a divine one’

 

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