HUMBOLTS GIFT - Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift is a slice-of-life novel with undertones of dark comedy. From the perspective of Charlie Citrine, a poet and essayist of considerable success, it examines life in America from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. Much of the novel consists of Charlie's memories of his childhood in Chicago and his days in Greenwich Village with his mentor, Von Humboldt Fleischer, who has already descended into madness and death at the time of the telling. Charlie is driven throughout the novel by memories and recriminations of Humboldt.

Citraine intersperses his reveries over Fleischer with his adventures or incidents with Rinaldo Cantabile, a try hard mobster who attaches himself to Citraine after a card game.

This is wonderfully written and gives a fine view of America into the early '70's with the start of the celebrity culture. The novel was published first in 1975.

Charlie is too weak for my liking wandering through life semi-detached due to his success- he has money troubles, women troubles, gangster troubles - all due to his desire that all life should be " nice" "artistic", for a want of better words. In the end Charlie was frustrating, he needed a good slap to bring him back to the real world.

But in saying this, I will read this again, it is great and I can see why Bellow is Martin Amis's hero and I can also see why Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is very similar, a man completely out of touch with what is happening about him.

There is several layers to everything written in this novel and I was not able to comprehend them all at the first go, but I will go back as there is much more to get from this.

THE PREGNANT WIDOW - Martin Amis

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.

VISITING MRS NABOKOV and other excursions - Martin Amis

This is another collection of occasional articles, a follow up to - The Moronic Inferno.

This also consists of reviews and interviews of the famous and not so famous. There are also a couple of travel pieces thrown in as well.

This collection does not have the consistency of the previous one and some of it has a " scraping the bottom of the filing cabinet " feel. As in - Cannes - where he rambles on about topless beaches, he even apologises in a new preface for the standard of the article.

Most unforgivable of all he does a very disparaging review of a Rolling Stones concert. This is a mortal sin.

When he is good Amis is excellent as in - Chess: Kasporov v Karpov - on the world of chess. I found out it that cheating has been rampant in chess for hundreds of years, not out and out stealing of pieces, but very heavy gamesmanship, fascinating stuff.

This is still worth the read but not as good as other articles that he has put together, but not a bad Sunday filler.

THE MORONIC INFERNO and other visits to America - Martin Amis

Published in 1986 this is a series of occasional pieces written for magazines and news papers.

There are 27 interviews and reviews included in this compilation and 26 of them are really interesting. The 27th was about someone I had never heard of and as this is about me, there you have it.

Amis covers Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer,Gloria Steinman, Truman Capote and many others as well as a couple of news events.

They are all very well written with Amis's humour running through them all. The only annoying thing is that while reading a interview on one of the subjects there will be a page break and you find that you are now reading a review of the latest book of the person that was previously being interviewed. At the end of the chapter you then find that it was cobbled together from two different articles from two different publications published many years apart!!!

But the above problem is not the authors but the editor's NOTE: Mr Editor it doesn't work.

The subjects and books are all interesting with a highlight being the Claus von Bulow trial. Not a nice man at all.

And this little one from the Joseph Heller chapter on a review of his novel "God Knows" - Like cunnilingus, tending sheep is dark and lonely work; but someone has to do it.

Highly recommended as a bath or travel collection, short sharp chapters that will entertain.