If anyone, ever, makes one of those very controversial but exciting lists selecting the best comedies in the History of Literature and number one goes to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, few mandarins will feel brave enough to differ. In fact, on many occasions the pages in which Martin Amis’ dad talks about character Jim Dixon waking up after getting plastered the night before have been chosen as the best possible description of a hangover. And Kingsley Amis knew very well the morning hell he was talking about, not in vain had he a compilation of texts entitled .
We have torn from it, precisely, these post-apocalyptic alcoholic binge pages and have asked Rafa Castells whether he had any image that could illustrate them. “Of course! I’ve got lots of wasted people.” So he sent to us this wasted poetry image that we think works pretty well as a threatening foreword to great Kingsley’s text.

Torn pages

Lucky Jim

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.” 

(…) 

“When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover.” 

KINGSLEY AMIS, Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis  ×  Rafa Castells

Torn pages: Lucky Jim – O Production Company

Marcos, abril 2014 by Rafa Castells