Money - Martin Amis

 

London Fields, I was fully behind. Witty, engaging, "reasonably excessive". 

Money, on the other hand, was for me a completely pointless exercise. Its vitriolic portrayal of the excesses of the 1980s didn't read particularly vitriolic; just boring. And its depictions of the dodgy minor characters that populate the book are as lazily caricatural as their own names. 

I found this book to be as devoid of meaning as Wall Street with Michael Douglas. The biggest difference is that Wall Street made me lose a couple of hours, Money is a book that I dragged along for a good couple of weeks...

London Fields - Martin Amis

Another of those books that remained on my bookshelf for century because of their intimidating size. And another that I thoroughly enjoyed in the end.

I have to say I was actually kind of happy to find out that London Fields was not actually set in London Fields, as I struggle a fair bit with how fashionable the "hipsterland" between North and East London is.

The premise of the novel (a narrator, a murderer, a murderee and a foil) is genial, at least in my humble opinion. The prose is virtually flawless, and some passages might be among the best in recent British literature.

Sure, Nicola Six is an improbable character (to say the least!), and I could have done without the dystopian elements (not quite sure whether they really need to be there, to be honest), but London Fields remains a great book.



Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

One can only go so many years in the UK without reading any Kingsley Amis. And one can only work so many years in a univeristy without reading Lucky Jim. 

A couple of months removed from the book, I'm now wondering what I was left with after I finished it. Turns out, not so much - the fact that the academic world doesn't seem to have changed that much over the past 60 years is interesting but not particularly surprising, and as for the humour I'm afraid it's a bit dated (or maybe I should learn to refer to my colleagues as "old chaps" and try to be more quintessentially British?) and, at the cost of sounding blasphemous, I'd pick a lighthearted David Nicholls novel over Lucky Jim if all I need is a bit of fun. 

The Zone of Interest – Martin Amis

One of those extremely rare books that I borrowed from a library (actually two libraries, since I read half of it in its Italian translation in Bra – yes, my hometown has a funny name! – and half of it in its original version in London). I had somehow managed to avoid reading anything by both Kingsley and Martin Amis, but my mom told me I absolutely had to read The Zone of Interest, and for once I did as I was told straight away.

The Zone of Interest is hugely moving, despite the fact that a number of its characters occasionally read a bit too much like allegories of the German population of the time. Needless to say, of the three main narrators, the Jewish Szmul is the one who often provides the most interesting insight into the (fictionalized) life of the camp. Somehow, though, I have the feeling that the epilogue is a bit unnecessary (much like I felt no need for the final chapters of Group Portrait with Lady or the last book of The Tin Drum) and I feel like the novel would have had a more long-lasting impact on me without its final pages.

The book also made me think about artists telling the stories of people that are not their own. In particular I thought about the comments made by Spike Lee on Tarantino’s Django Unchained. To me, as long as you have class and tact (like Martin Amis in this case), you can tell anyone’s story – sadly two things that were lacking from Spike Lee’s Miracle at Sant’Anna.