Customer Reviews

Augustus Carp Esq. By Himself (Prion Humour Classics)

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I first became aware of this lost classic through Frank Muir's anthology of comic prose. I was lucky enough to find a copy in my local library and, following several hysteria-plagued re-readings, I decided to buy a second-hand copy. This book inspires devotees. I enquired after many newly advertised second-hand copies of the book online, only to be told by dealers that the book had been sold immediately on being placed online, and that, moreover, I was the sixth or seventh person to have asked after it. (I did manage to snare a copy eventually.) So Prion is doing the reading public a great service in rescuing the book from its undeserved out-of-print limbo. Augustus Carp is an anti-hero who can easily stand comparison with Waugh's greatest snobs, and as a bore and a prig he could almost have sprung from the mind of Patrick Hamilton (another neglected genius). Anyone who has ever felt that the Church is rather too keen to deny basic pleasures will find the book's feverish satire a tonic; loathers of hypocrisy will put it by their bedside tables; those who love to laugh will buy four or five copies for friends. It's that good.

I have never been guilty of laughing out loud when reading a book, until now. Augustus Carp is simply irresistible, and the more supercilious and flawed his character is shown to be (through his own writings!), the funnier it gets; though not unaccompanied by a certain nervous introspection... after all, who among us is without some self-deluded failings? So it is humor (humour) with an edge, as is characteristic of all the best British humor. Like a good martini, it is dry and leaves you stirred, and perhaps chuckling a little helplessly...

This is the end of the Victorian age and the nineteenth century. Augustus Carp tells us about his life as a young man, brought up in a middle-class family. A nattering nabob, a supreme snob, an obnoxious boor, and a prig given to hourly flatulence. He spends his time correcting others to the point of suing them, while he himself is always right and, of course, superior to any human being. He keeps his mother as a slave and destroys those around him. Can the comeuppance be lurking in the future?

Find out by reading this very, very funny book. This is a fabulous satire of a morally uptight generation,

I stumbled upon this book years ago and have read it three times. I hope others will stumble upon it too because Augustus Carp is one of the funniest books I've ever read. It is an anonymously written British satire pitched perfectly, a book that makes fun of religious hypocrisy without ever showing any signs of strain or going overboard - no mean feat given that the tale's narrator (Mr. Augustus Carp) is also the focal point of the humor. The book also contains some wonderful drawings of it characters and, even, some wonderfully pompous footnoting. Find it, read it, laugh at it.

If you liked A Confederacy of Dunces, by the late John Kennedy Toole, or Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, you will almost certainly like this small book. Delightfully unreliable narrator, ridiculously self-important and hypocritical, as completely annoying as he is outrageously laughable. A story that sets out to be as infinite as a mobius strip.

The "author" of this "autobiography" sets out to use his own life story as an example in the hope of saving his reader, his thousands of readers, or even thousands and thousands, or possibly thousands and thousands and thousands of readers, from certain death. I dare say he fails miserably, for if you are a reader, you must die laughing. Be warned.

At a mere 136 pages, and no longer out of print, you can hardly deny your collection this re-readable comic pleasure.

It is rather sad to find this little gem -- masterpiece, even -- of British humour to be out of print. Written in 1924 by an an author who remained unknown until a couple of decades ago, it is a worthy successor to "The Diary of a Nobody". For the cognoscente certain phrases have entered the vocabulary: "Better 'tus than 'tin" and "The aunt who stood with my mother's mother at the foot of the stairs". Augustus Carp, the unflinching opponent of sin in all its manifestations, is a Really Good Man and a true Xtian.