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The Pregnant Widow (2010)

par Martin Amis

Autres auteurs: Voir la section autres auteur(e)s.

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6232237,315 (3.26)17
The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, amid the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing--twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel--is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendency toward his own ends.… (plus d'informations)
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Affichage de 1-5 de 22 (suivant | tout afficher)
Much better than any of Amis' more recent efforts. Certainly entertaining without being too corrosive. Now I need to reread Amis' memoir Experience to see how much of Pregnant Widow is based on his life.

A summer read for sure. ( )
  monicaberger | Jan 22, 2024 |
I can seen why some reviewers had a problem with this book. It's talky, and there doesn't seem to be much going on.

But that's also kind of what I loved about it. It was just what the doctor ordered for the start of the summer: a funny book about a bunch of characters who seem like they'd be good fun to hang out with, which is basically what I did for the month I took reading it.

I'm a huge fan of Martin Amis--as in, 'favorite living author' huge--and that probably biases my review of this book a bit. His style strikes all the right chords with me. Reading it was like drinking a really great cocktail, and not getting a hangover. ( )
  bookwrapt | Mar 31, 2023 |
Modern, late middle aged man on his third wife remembers a summer in Italy. Keith remembers the 1970s, sexual revolution, what happened, what went wrong, what he screwed up, the people,and where he is at. I guess approaching 50 myself, I look back and can relate in many ways. ( )
  evil_cyclist | Mar 16, 2020 |
Amis, Martin (2010). The Pregnant Widow. London: Jonathan Cape. 2010.

A me Martin Amis piace tantissimo, fondamentalmente per la sua cattiveria e il suo sarcasmo. Non sempre, però, sa mantenersi all’ottimo livello cui ci hanno abituati romanzi come London Fields (il suo capolavoro, a parer mio) e in questi casi capita di restare un po’ delusi, alla fin fine.

Penso di avere letto tutte, o quasi, le opere che ha pubblicato in volume (ho fatto un rapido controlo su Wikipedia: mi sa che ho letto proprio tutto!), ma su questo blog ho recensito soltanto una raccolta di saggi, The Second Plane.

Al proposito, va detto che Amis scrive, molto spesso, saggi (forse è più appropriato usare, come in inglese, semplicemente il negativo: non-fiction), e con opinioni appassionatamente e polemicamente sostenute, spesso al limite del paradosso (e senza paura di cambiare drasticamente opinione, dal timore/terrore militante dell’annichilamento atomico della gioventù all’esplicito sostegno all’avventura militare irachenapiù di recente, pur restando sempre morbosamente affascinato dalle figure – Saddam o Stalin – in cui si incarna il male, che tende sempre a percepire e descrivere come assoluto), in genere fortemente controverse, fino allo scandalo sulla scena letteraria britannica. In questo modo, il confine tra non-fiction con grandi capacità letterarie e fiction ricca di opinioni e osservazioni di costume tende a sfumarsi.

Mi sembra – e non sono il solo a dirlo – che con questo romanzo Amis torni ai fasti della trilogia londinese (Money, London Fields, The Information) dopo alcune prove piuttosto opache. Ancora di più, non fosse che per motivi anagrafici, The Pregnant Widow ci riporta ai tempi e ai temi del romanzo di debutto di Amis, The Rachel Papers, in cui Amis ci aveva fatto incontrare il suo alter ego Charles Highway, brillante e narcisistico teenager che seguiamo a Londra nell’estate precedente il suo ingresso a Oxford, cui è ovviamente predestinato per censo e cultura prima che per qualità intrinseche.

In The Pregnant Widow siamo nell’estate del 1970. L’alter ego dell’autore si chiama questa volta Keith Nearing e Amis non nasconde gli intenti autobiografici in modo insieme sarcastico e spavaldo:

Everything that follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true (Rita is true, Adriano, incredibly, is true). Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent. Or else all of them were innocent – but cannot be protected. [p. 4]

Con la medesima programmatica spavalderia, a epigrafe del libro è riportata la definizione di narcisismo del Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Al di là della storia, a volte toccante, a volte grottesca, il romanzo è percorso dalla sensazione che quegli anni fossero un crocevia della storia – anni rivoluzionari, ma la rivoluzione era la rivoluzione sessuale, come ha raccontato anche Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers – I sognatori – e che gli adolescenti di allora (Keith è alla vigilia del suo 21esimo compleanno) ne siano stati più le vittime che gli eroi.

Io ho qualche anno meno di Amis e del suo protagonista, e certamente (ancorché in molte dimensioni un privilegiato anch’io) ero piuttosto distante culturalmente e socialmente da quell’élite cui appartengono Keith Nearing e le sue amiche. Eppure, il romanzo ha toccato in me corde diverse, anche se non necessariamente più profonde, di quelle solite: ho sentito vivissima quella specie di inquietudine piena di attese e di ansie che mi accompagnavano alle feste e agli incontri con ragazze “nuove”, la distanza tra il mio mondo interiore e quello che riuscivo a trasmettere all’esterno (e che mi sembrava, e probabilmente era, paurosamente inadeguato). Ho rivissuto in Keith la capacità narcisistica di produrre affabulazioni ai limiti dell’autoinganno e cui volevo disperatamente credere. E condivido il punto di vista di Keith (il cui io narrante ripercorre quell’estate 40 anni dopo) e probabilmente dello stesso Amis che alcune settimane e alcuni mesi di quegli anni di formazione ci hanno poi accompagnato e segnato per sempre, sono stati momenti fondanti del nostro personale Bildungsroman.

A me, per esempio, l’atmosfera del “castello” in Campania ha ricordato un inizio di settembre, mi pare fosse il 1969, in cui attraverso amici di amici (o più esattamente amici dei figli di amici di mio padre) avevo incontrato una biondissima e bellissima sedicenne, figlia di professionisti napoletani, con spettacolare villa sulla costa tra Sperlonga e Gaeta. Il fatto che i genitori la lasciassero sola nella villa durante la settimana (OK, con una persona di servitù), e che quindi noi ragazzi fossimo soli sulla spiaggia e nella casa, aveva profondamente sconvolto le mie fantasie (non che se ne fosse accorto nessuno, spero). Se chiudo gli occhi rivedo la peluria dorata che aveva sulla nuca e sulle braccia abbronzate. Per me era Nausicaa in bikini e pareo, punto e basta.

La vedova incinta del titolo è un riferimento al rivoluzionario russo Alexander Herzen, e a un’espressione coniata nel suo Dall’altra sponda (Milano: Adelphi, 1993):

The title is borrowed from Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century Russian thinker. “The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” Herzen wrote. “Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of another, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.” [Alex Bilmes, ""Martin Amis: 'Women have got too much power for their own good' ", The Telegraph, 2 febbraio 2010]

Il libro è da leggere, se conoscete già Martin Amis. Se non lo conoscete, vi suggerisco di non cominciare da qui, ma (forse) dalla trilogia londinese. Qui di seguito, comunque, qualche assaggio.

* * *

Nicholas, when he was coming of age in the mid-1960s, found himself involved in a series of long, boring, repetitve, and in fact completely circular arguments with his father. [...]
The circular arguments were ostensibly about various limits to be imposed on Nicholas’s Freedom and independence. In fact they were about sex before marriage. But there was never any mention of sex before marriage (rendering the arguments circular). And this was Professor Karl Shackleton, sociologist, positivist, progressivist. Karl was all those things – but he hadn’t had sex before marriage. And, looking back, he liked the idea of having sex before marriage. We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women.
[...] It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And envy, the dictionary suggest, takes us by a knight’s move to empathy. From L. invidere ‘regard maliciously’, from in- ‘into’ videre ‘to see’. Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy at the wrong place in the wrong time. [pp. 112-113]

[Keith e Lily discutono Jane Austen]
‘Catherine Morland has big tits. Jane Austen more or less tells you that. It’s in code. See, Lydia’s the tallest and youngest sister – and she’s stout. That’s code for a big arse.’
‘And what’s the code for big tits?’
‘Consequence. When Catherine’s growing up she gets plumper and her figure gains consequence. Consequence – that’s code for big tits.’ [p. 158]

There used to be the class system, and the race system, and the sex system. the three systems are gone or going. And now we have the age system.
Those between twenty-eight and thirty-five, ideally fresh, are the super-elite, the tsars and tsarinas; those between eighteen and twenty-eight, plus those between thirty-five and forty-five, are the boyars, the nobles; all the others under sixty comprise the bourgeoisie; everybody between sixty and seventy represents the proletariat, the hoi polloi; and those even older than that are the serfs and the wraiths of slaves.
Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers9. And we will be hated too. Governance, for at least a generation, Keith read, will be a matter of trasferring wealth fron the young to the old. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing… [p. 230]

You know, it’s not the rich who’re really different from us. It’s the beautiful. [p. 244]

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘Love story. The one we hated. Remember? Hysterical sex means never having to say you’re sorry.’
[...] The truth of it being that love meant always having to say you’re sorry. [p. 244]

What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, you greet what comes (p. 381]

Death – the dark backing a mirror needs before it can show us ourselves. [p. 462] ( )
  Boris.Limpopo | Apr 29, 2019 |
Medium intensity Amis, checking the mirror for further dissent. It shouldn't change anyone's life, but it was enjoyable. ( )
  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 22 (suivant | tout afficher)
The fizzy, smart linguistic fireworks, with their signature italicisms, riffs on the language and stunningly clever, off-center metaphors are certainly evident in “The Pregnant Widow.” But this may not be the Roman candle of a novel some of his followers are looking for. Perhaps his next one will do the trick.
 
“The revolution was a velvet revolution, but it wasn’t bloodless; some came through, some more or less came through, and some went under”; although much of The Pregnant Widow feels – like the period it describes – pitched uncomfortably between two stools and styles, it also shows Amis growing into a new mode, as a chronicler of loss and uncomfortable metamorphosis. If his next novels continue in this vein, then this book’s own awkward transition will have been worthwhile.
 

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Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Martin Amisauteur principaltoutes les éditionscalculé
Pacey, StevenNarrateurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Асланян, АннаTraducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
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The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, amid the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing--twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel--is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendency toward his own ends.

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