Martin Amis
Il Dossier Rachel

LA RECENSIONE

After finishing reading Kazuo Kamimura, Hideo Okazaki “I Fiori del Male” (a review written by our Renji for DeBaser on June 7, ’22), I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea if a skilled artist turned this first book (which I didn't intend to review but which, in my humble opinion, is full of situations worthy of being represented even in comics) produced by Martin Louis Amis in the mid-'70s into a manga. But to be completely honest, I read on wiki that someone beat me to it by making a film (which I haven't seen yet) with the same title, namely “The Rachel Papers” released in ’89.

In short, the plot consists of the sexual and other adventures of the soon-to-be twenty-year-old Charles Highway, who is about to take the exams that will get him into the prestigious “Oxford University”. The whole thing is described in an intelligent and witty manner, gathering diaries the young man keeps over the last 19 years on almost everything, including one on how to approach and conclude with the, uh, fair sex, a diary/dossier that will never be put to use, as the circumstances he faces are dictated by the ever-unpredictable moods of the various protagonists.

The book transports us to an England where the hippie movement is giving way to a new era, without neglecting art forms such as music or that English literature that contemplates William Blake, John Keats, and even William Shakespeare, whom the protagonist continuously references to navigate life. It honestly shows us his troubled relationship (and here too there is some masked autobiography) with his womanizing father, the unstable marital situation of his sister, and the only other person he's attached to, namely his sole friend Geoffrey, constantly drunk with various cocktails of drugs, pills, and alcohol.

Despite some criticisms of this new writer, considered an enfant terrible of contemporary literature, endowed with significant linguistic virtuosity and equally comic verve, he won the “Somerset Maugham Award” as the best novel by a writer under thirty-five a year after its publication. And nothing, or rather, no, I'll just add this which I found on the web: Amis noted in a 2010 interview titled "Martin Amis and the sex war" that, by his high standards, the novel "seemed raw ... Not the writing. It was terribly alive. The craft. The sex. The settings... [were] all incredibly mocking.” And in a subsequent interview, also in 2010, he criticized his debut, stating that "There is talk of energy and originality in his first novel, but now it seems so raw. Not meaning vulgar language, but it is put together so clumsily. The sense of decorum, the slowing down of a sentence, the scrupulousness that I feel I have gained, are not there. As you get older, your craft, the ability to know what goes where, what goes when, is much sharper.”