El libro de Rachel
Por Martin Amis
3.5/5
()
Información de este libro electrónico
Inteligente, frívolo, descarado, narcisista incluso cuando le sale un grano en la nariz, Charles Highway, el narrador y protagonista de esta excelente y divertidísima novela, es un joven que, a falta de ritos de paso institucionalizados, se inventa uno por cuenta propia. Cuando está a punto de cumplir los veinte años se da cuenta de que todavía no se ha acostado con ninguna mujer, aunque lo haya hecho con montones de chicas de su edad, y decide que su obligación ineludible es tener esa experiencia a modo de despedida de la inmadurez.
Pero Charles Highway, niño prodigio y neurótico precoz, es un joven con altas aspiraciones literarias, y lo que pudo haber sido un ligue más se le convierte en una complicadísima operación autobiográfica y autoanalítica que da, como resultado final, este Libro de Rachel. Un libro en el que tienen cabida desde la revolución sexual, los años setenta y el rock hasta el conflicto de generaciones y el propio mito de la juventud, todo ello observado desde un punto de vista satírico y escéptico. A esta actitud rabiosamente moderna se unen una prodigiosa naturalidad y un gran talento literario, que convirtieron la publicación inglesa de esta obra en un auténtico acontecimiento.
Martin Amis
Martin Amis (Swansea, 1949 - Florida, 2023) estudió en Oxford y debutó brillantemente como novelista con El libro de Rachel, galardonada en 1973 con el Premio Somerset Maugham, publicada en España (en 1985) por Anagrama, al igual que Otra gente,Dinero, Campos de Londres, La flecha del tiempo, La información, Tren nocturno, Niños muertos, Perro callejero, La Casa de los Encuentros, La viuda embarazada, Lionel Asbo. El estado de Inglaterra y La zona de interés, los relatos de Mar gruesa, los ensayos de Visitando a Mrs. Nabokov, La guerra contra el cliché, El segundo avión y El roce del tiempo, y los libros de carácter autobiográfico Experiencia y Koba el Temible. Su última obra es Desde dentro.
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Comentarios para El libro de Rachel
369 clasificaciones17 comentarios
- Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas4/5Charles Highway is approaching his twentieth birthday. All too soon his teenage years will come to a close. But there are yet things to be done: he must study for and write the entrance exams for Oxford, compose a bitingly cruel letter of rebuke to his philandering father, dissipate in London (though admittedly in the basement of his sister’s house), bring his sardonic wrath down upon the history of literature, and oh, sleep with an older woman. Rachel, two months his senior, is his choice. And just as his does with his exam prep, his letter to his father, his personal chronicle of his dissipation, Charles has a dossier on Rachel, a battle plan, if you will, that will ensure his conquest. Well, maybe.Charles may be nineteen but his angst-ridden sexual single-mindedness makes him seem more like an emotionally stunted younger teen. As though the various medical conditions that delayed his education also retarded his psychological growth. But his scatter-gun distain is telling, especially when he ends up being its target, which is often the case. He knows that he is ridiculous, but then so is the world around him and everyone in it. The irony is that when he isn’t self-consciously an ass, he is an attentive lover capable of real emotional connection. But only up to the point of realization. Then he seems determined to crush out any honest emotion like the dregs of a cigarette.The writing here is deceptive. Charles is not sympathetic. And even when he lets his mask slip, it’s difficult to have any emotional investment in his plight. Amis’ writing absolutely delights in Charles’ self-loathing. As Charles writes in one of his exam papers, there is a “meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling.” Amis knows precisely what he is doing and is completely willing to skewer himself in the process. It is a first novel that announces that more and greater things are bound to come from this writer (and they do). After a slow start, it entirely won me over at least to an appreciation of Amis’ much-touted skill.Recommended.
- Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas2/5I read this at a certain time in my life, and now it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
- Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas5/5If Philip Roth is correct and life is misunderstanding people, then I remain awed by the riddle which is Martin Amis. His first novel The Rachel Papers injects self-awareness into satire, leaking a fecund foam which changes everything about how we regard the way we live now. The insecurity of adolescence is illustrated by our protagonist, one Charles Highway, who diagrams said angst and provides cross-references from the literary canon. One can imagine the reader or protagonsit saying bugger Holden Caulfield, then recognizing that Highway has likely compiled a list of ten reasons as to his superiority over Mr. Caulfield.
During a lazy gap year Charles writes, drinks and woos the titular Rachel. Life doesn't meet his precis. Plans have to change. Matters become a little Meta and we are left a little uncertain about what is actual and what is fictive. This is one of the most hilarious novels I've read. Numerous passages left me almost convulsing with laughter. - Calificación: 1 de 5 estrellas1/5One of the rare books that I just can not stomach to read to the end.
- Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas4/5Amis is the son of English author Kingsley Amis (who, famously, never read any of his son’s books); this probably makes them the most talented father-son literary pair in history (Alexandre Dumas pere and fils perhaps running a distant second). Amis’ fiction tends to be dark and quirky; I’ve read London Fields and Night Train, both sort-of-mysteries and the short story collection Heavy Water, which includes the funny but sad “Career Move”, about an alternate universe where poets are big-name celebrities courted by international business while screenwriters are limited to self-publishing and sponging off their friends. In nonfiction, his autobiography Experience mostly discusses his troubled relationship with father and family, and Koba the Dread is a scathing indictment of intellectual fascination with Communism.
The current subject is The Rachel Papers, his first novel; sort of a The Catcher in the Rye if Holden Caulfield lived in 1970s London, did a lot of drugs and booze, and was breathtakingly pretentious. The protagonist, Charles Highway, is obviously Amis; they share terrible teeth and a promiscuous father. Nineteen-year-old Highway invents himself as a Byronic literary figure to the extent that he documents all his relationships, romantic or otherwise, in file folders – hence the title (Rachel gets not only a folder but a notebook to herself). Before each romantic encounter, Highway carefully scatters works of literature around his attic room (deliberately swapped with his younger brother so Charles can live in a garret) and documents the mental and physical seduction strategy he will use on Rachel and the various other women in his life. Amis manages to make Highway despicable and likeable at the same time, no mean trick; I suppose the most disconcerting thing was I recognized that I was doing exactly the same thing when I was 19 – with considerably less success and more poorly documented (although I did write diaries of teenage angst, hoping someone else would read them and realize how tragically misunderstood I was).
Which brings up a scifi cliché; suppose you could go back in time and talk to your 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 year old self; what would you tell them? Would the 61-year-old Setnahkt have anything meaningful to say to the 10-year-old Setnahkt? (“Buy Microsoft when it goes public” would seem obvious, except that Microsoft wouldn’t exist for another 14 years). I suppose I could tell the younger me to stop spending so much allowance money on model airplanes and study instead, but a 10-year-old who did that would be the dullest kid in the neighborhood. Come to think of it, though, I already was the dullest kid in the neighborhood, so it wouldn’t matter much.
At any rate, The Rachel Papers and the other Amis’ I’ve read are recommended, although it will help if you’re in sort of a wry mode when you read them. - Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas4/5sex + a dictionary = The Rachel Papers...an enjoyable read!
- Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas5/5I love this damn book. I have probably read it 20 times or more. I don't know why - it's just one of those books that struck me as thoroughly entertaining.
- Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas4/5Is this great literature? No. But I did really like it. It should sit next to Rabbit, Run and Portnoy's Complaint, but with the benefit of being much, much better written than the first, and more interesting than the second. Also, compared to 'Dead Babies,' which was my first M. Amis read, this is much less datedly 'shocking.' Reading DB was a bit like listening to a teenager with green-dyed hair talking about how much she's subverting Them. Kind of cute, but also more than a bit tragic. I didn't get that feeling here, thank the lord.
Aside from being hilarious, the book's strength is the distance between the character, the reader, the 'implied author' (sorry for the jargon, but it's a useful one) and Amis himself. That distance separates the book from Roth. Roth always makes me think that, not only does the protagonist = the implied author = Roth, but also that the reader is being morally bullied into identifying with Roth; there is nobody I less want to identify with. Here, Amis is distant from Charles Highway; he starts off letting the reader be distant, then eventually forces you to be - the conclusion is the only truly shocking part of the book, but it's perfectly right. But Charles Highway is himself distant from Charles Highway, thanks to the narrative structure. Nice.
All that said, this is clearly a love it or loathe it kind of deal. I wonder how funny it would be to someone who was never a teenage boy? Or perhaps more importantly, to men or women who like to think that being a teenager is all wide-eyed joy and openness to the world and lack of responsibility and stress. Probably not funny at all. And you'll hate it if you can only like books when you like the protagonist. But if you're one of those people, I mean, come on, really? You're missing a lot of great books. - Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas2/5Read this a long time ago and remember finding it sexist and annoying. I always mean to look at it again to see if that was a mistaken judgment of youth. Also have never been able to get the underwear stuff out of my head.
- Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas3/5Ok. Funny in parts. Very 70's!
- Calificación: 1 de 5 estrellas1/5A decidedly unpleasant novel - I felt that I needed a shower after reading this.Published in 1973 this book recounts Charles Highway's attempts to sleep with an older woman, the Racherl of the title, before his twentieth birthday. Great scope there, of course, for a touching and amusing "coming of age" novel, but Amis characteristically eschews this opportunity, choosing instead to delve and revel in the seamier side. Occasionally amusing, and we all know that Amis fils can write, but all in all a rather sordid expense of spirit in a waste of shame on the reader's part at least, even if not the writer's.
- Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas4/5i don't enjoy ma any more. he just seems so unpleasant. so i wasn't expecting to like this. but i did. he captured being 20 and being so self focused. being in love at noon and out of it by 6
- Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas3/5Hmm...I actually liked the principal character, Charles, in the beginning, but by the end of the book I was thinking, "typical...boys!" Boys will always be boys, I guess.It's humourous, I GUESS, if you're prepared to laugh at everything that goes along with being 20. But it's sort of a cruel dig at how seriously a 20 year old takes his own self. It's twisted and crude, but if that's how you like it..hmm...oh yeah, and Charles turns out to be a selfish, shallow, hollow excuse for a human being. Yeah, he's just being his age, but I do agree with the poster who said he shouldn't have got the girl!
- Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas3/5Ok. Funny in parts. Very 70's!
- Calificación: 1 de 5 estrellas1/5I usually don't review books I don't finish. That's not fair. But I attempted this one twice, the second time on an airplane where I finally resorted to reading the inflight magazine instead. I kept waiting to find it hilarious and brilliant based on its reputation and even more so the reputation of its author, but it just never happened. At least not in the first half. The characters were all either loathsome or colorless. There was way too much on bodily fluids. This is a 19 year old, not a 12 year old. I kept trying to figure out a way it was symbolism or brilliant satire, because it certainly wasn't realism. But that must have gone over my head too. Overall it was more Benny Hill than Wodehouse, which is disorienting in a book marketed as being intellectual. Although there is definitely a breed of humor out there that high-end critics and award panels find bitingly brilliant and I always just find vulgar slapstick, so there you go -- this is one of those. When it wasn't annoying it was dull. But mostly it was annoying.
- Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas2/5All in all quite disappointing. One gets the feeling that the true subject of the book is the anxiety of not being admitted to the Oxford college of choice and that the sexual shenanigans are a way to deal with this anxiety just as the numerous drugs and schools of literary criticism in the book are presented as a way of dealing with sexual anxiety. There are however some really good images. My favorite: "A checkerboard of nuns crossing the street".
- Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas5/5Hmmm. A bookish teenager trying to get into a posh university while being distracted by girls (specifically, by a girl slightly out of his league)? What's not to like?