![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Amis.jpg\" "\\"Amis\\"")
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Having just finished Martin Amis’s most recent book, \u201cThe Pregnant Widow,\u201d we will add this book to a small list that we recommend you read, but only if you have an unflappable, omni-euphoric disposition.\u00a0 We are not so disposed and are reeling around the fountain after finishing this fable.\u00a0\u00a0 Amis is, however, one of our favorite wordsmiths still extant so it pains us to have to append this warning.\u00a0 Which leads to the definitive Amis gambit:\u00a0 if, despite our warning, you pick up this book, and if you appreciate stellar prose, you will find yourself sucked in, laughing hysterically, admiring the pregnant prose, and unable to stop even though the subject matter is, ultimately, oppressively disheartening.\u00a0 Side note: other books falling into this stellar-but-painful category are Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s \u201cNever Go Away\u201d (this book is inexplicably being made into a movie featuring Keira Knightley to be released in December–just says “Christmas” doesn’t it?), Cormac McCarthy\u2019s \u201cThe Road,\u201d and Richard Yates\u2019 \u201cRevolutionary Road.\u201d<\/p>\n
The main events of “The Pregnant Widow” are set in the summer of 1970 at a castle above an Italian village in the Campania region.\u00a0 Amis\u2019s narrator looks back on that time in the castle from a 21st century vantage and ruminates on the characters’ lives and society\u2019s evolution or devolution.\u00a0\u00a0 College students from England have come to stay in the castle: the protagonist\/narrator, Keith; his girlfriend, Lily; a captivating blonde with the suggestive name, Scheherazade, as a collection of couples and acquaintances come and go, all runwaying throughout the pages and flaunting the appetites of their youth and the era.\u00a0 Despite the vitality of this time and these characters, towards the end of the book we discover that Keith\u2019s life has been largely a professional and personal disappointment, and that he pinpoints that summer in Italy as the time when the wheels started falling off.<\/p>\n
To this end, the title of the book is borrowed from the Russian writer, Alexander Herzen, and refers to an old order about to be upstaged by a new one: \u201cThe departing world leaves behind it not an heir but a pregnant widow,\u201d Herzen wrote, \u201ca long night of chaos and desolation\u201d in which the old is gone and the new has not yet been born.<\/p>\n
Regardless, Amis is one of the most unique, intelligent writers to come along in the last 30+ years, with his cunning linguistics, hilarities, etymologies, italicisms, and unique metaphors, all of which are paraded in \u201cThe Pregnant Widow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Amis has said elsewhere that the novel is “blindingly autobiographical” and, you can\u2019t help but believe him.\u00a0 We can\u2019t help thinking of Martin\u2019s father\u2019s (Kingsley Amis\u2019s) taunting observation:\u00a0 “Aren’t they nice, the young? They have stayed up for two years drinking instant coffee together, and now they are opinionated \u2013 they have opinions\u2026.” Correspondingly, Martin remarks on the young and their nostalgia: <\/em>“Nostalgia<\/em>, from Gk nostos<\/em> ‘return home’ + algos<\/em> ‘pain’ ‘the return-home-pain of twenty years old’.”\u00a0 So take that, father.\u00a0 We remember our nostalgia and feel it in our own.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll leave it to you decide whether or not to read the book.\u00a0 And with that we give you below some dips into Amis\u2019s writing from the book.\u00a0 You can then decide whether to dive deeper with the Widow <\/em>or be satisfied with the sampling and instead sun in the shallow end.<\/p>\n “And the storms…were timed for his insomnias [a subject near to our hearts].\u00a0 He was making friends with the hours he barely knew, the one called Three, the one called Four.\u00a0 They racked him, these storms, but he was left with a cleaner morning.\u00a0 Then the days began again to thicken, building to another war in heaven.”<\/p>\n “Keith lay in his bed, trying to understand [the Cold War].\u00a0 What was the outcome of the dream war and all that silent combat?\u00a0 Everything could vanish, at any moment. This disseminated an unconscious but pervasive mortal fear.\u00a0 And mortal fear might make you want to have sexual intercourse; but it couldn’t make you want to love.\u00a0 Why love anyone, when everything could vanish?\u00a0 So maybe it was love that took the wound, in the Passchendaele of mad dreams.”<\/p>\n “And we [the Baby Boomer generation] will be hated too.\u00a0 Governance, for at least a generation, <\/em>Keith read, will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old.<\/em> And they won’t like that, the young.\u00a0 They won’t like the silver tsunami, <\/em>with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants.\u00a0 There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing….”<\/p>\n And though we disagree, this musing on the dangers of smoking set against the sarcastically characterized pains of a life long-lived (that “cool bit”) caught our attention:<\/p>\n “He thought, Yeah.\u00a0 Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer.\u00a0 Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time?\u00a0 It won’t be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.”<\/p>\n “He left her there beneath the slow, creaking loop of the overhead fan.\u00a0 And we don’t quite trust the overhead fan, do we.\u00a0 Because it always seems to be unscrewing itself.”<\/p>\n Martin Amis reading an excerpt from “The Pregnant Widow”:<\/p>\n