Just try to suggest a more hilarious novel from the past half century. And what the hell can his masterpiece be like when rendered into the Serbo-Croat tongue?
How the old buzzard would have gagged, with mingled pride and disdain, at the thought of being so appreciated by a load of Continentals-nay, foreigners. But none I sink so amusing as ze Lucky Jim." This, delivered with perfect gravity in the lugubrious context of the Milosevic war, made me grin with inappropriate delight. "In our region zere are many such satires. Feeling this to be not quite sufficient, however, she added that the genre of "academic comedy" had enjoyed quite a vogue among Balkan writers. She knew that I had known Amis a little, and she expressed the proper condolences as soon as we met.
I was to have lunch the following day with a very clever but rather solemn Slovenian dissident. I happened to be in Sarajevo when Kingsley Amis died, in 1995. "AND A LOT BETTER.") But he seldom permitted any such heaviness to pervade his novels, and it is this very delicacy that allows one to answer the sensitive and dangerous question not Why is Lucky Jim funny? (daunting enough as an essay topic) but Why is it so funny? (George Du Maurier's Trilby, for example, "might be a lot worse," he wrote.
In That Uncertain Feeling (1955), one of Kingsley Amis's lesser novels, the narrator, John Lewis, is watching some young women play tennis, and decides to examine himself on an important question: "Why did I like women's breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?" It's surprising, in a way, that Amis didn't capitalize those last words, as he was apt to do when he required any savage or emotional emphasis in his correspondence with Philip Larkin.
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