We have a group of young people holidaying over summer at a Italian Castle.
The group concerned are all in their twenties and sex is on their mind.
That's it basically, they do what twenty year olds do, have sex and try and get as much of it as they can, all with their own conditions attached.
Keith Nearing the central character's purpose in life is to score not just sex, but 'hysterical' sex, as he describes it. i.e stuff a bit off the beaten track that he only gets from one of the girls. This leads to all his problems, thirty years down the track.
The whole thing is very funny and at times sad as things can be when you are twenty and things go pear shaped, when you think you are ruling the world and at the centre of the universe.
Once again we have Mr. Amis's fascination with topless sunbathing! He just goes on and on about it. Considering he's well travelled and now in his early sixties I would have thought he might have started to take it for granted. Then again Keith Nearing our hero never gets over it either.
My only complaint is a female character called, Scheherazade, this is bloody unpronouncible and appears about every second sentence, it drove me mad . There is no connection to One Thousand and One Nights so it would have made not one iota of difference if she had been called Bill or George, anything but Scheherazade.
A good read, not a brilliant read and not as good as his best, (Money?), but Amis doesn't try too hard to be too clever here which is good, because he can be so clever sometimes I can't understand him.
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