Customer Reviews

Wilt

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is Sharp's best novel yet, the second detailing the life of Wilt a college lecturer and his severely disfunctional family. In what is basically a farce Sharpe's satire bites deep into every subject he touches, as Wilt comes under investigation by the police for drug dealing, infiltrates a US nuclear air base and has to use face cream to cool his burning uncontrolable penis. If my description of this novel sounds manic, the reason is simple, the book is manic. As an Englishman living in the US I am not sure if the humor travels well, but I hope my American friends can appreciate it, because this book is one of only three (all written by Tom) capable of making me laugh out loud wherever I am reading it (which can be most embarrasing). Try it and enjoy a different view of life and then be thankful you don't have to live Wilt's life.

I bought this book 15 years ago when traveling. While waiting for a change of planes at Heathrow, I started reading, and couldn't put it down. I started chuckling to myself, then laughing out loud, then laughing so it hurt!! Other passengers were staring at me. I showed them what I reading and some of them nodded knowingly.

It is the funniest book I have ever read!

Wilt is the first Tom Sharpe novel I've read. Written some 20+ years ago, it's about a rather frustrated-with-life English literature lecturer, his bewildered wife, and their sex-crazed neighbors. It's all a wonderful farce with biting satire around the edges. Much of the humor has sexual undertones, but Wilt never turns vulgar.

Unless you find mild doses of profanity unacceptable, or sexual humor (about lesbianism, wife-swapping, etc) to be unfunny or distasteful, I think most everyone will love Wilt. Americans won't find it "too British", and the 1970s setting seems quaint rather than dated (..it's not like reading a screenplay of the Brady Bunch). However the material is probably not suitable for those under 15 years old.

Buy it and start laughing.

If you enjoy satire, and you like it laced with sexual innuendo, profanity and wit, you will love Tom Sharpe's books, but you will particularly love Wilt, which takes you into the world and never-ending irony of lower-class British academia. Henry Wilt is miserable in his existence as a "Tech" lecturer, married to Eva, his incorrigibly energetic, enthusiastic and critical wife. He attempts to escape by way of fantasizing how he might murder Eva, who has recently taken up with the sexually wacky American couple next door. After an embarrassing encounter with an inflatable doll, Wilt decides to practice murder on it, and ends up being accused of murdering Eva. A fantastic read.

What? No Wilt at Amazon? Lucky I have my well thumbed 20 years old copy safely stored away. People who make other people laugh have a gift, but the few people who can do it using the printed word alone, now that's rare genius and Tom Sharpe has it in spades. Wilt is not just a funny book with lots of gags. The character Wilt is an ordinary, sane man in an insane world, and don't we all feel like that some times? In a staid and respectable English university town, you have a community which should be the epitome of ordinariness but the characters who inhabit this town all seem driven by that very ordinariness in to committing ludicrous and hilarious acts which frightens you a little in their plausibility. Wilt is just doing the best he can to get through the day, but the world just would not let him. The troubles he get in to are as funny as they are painful and embarrassing, but in the end Wilt triumphs over the absurdities that surround him and we love Wilt because he defies the odds to come out on top.

Oh look, it's just a really really funny book, OK? It's not even that hard to find even if Amazon doesn't have it. Get all of Tom Sharpe's books, you won't regret it. Unless you are a boer, may be.

Henry Wilt is just a regular guy with 'semi' normal thoughts and ambitions, trying to get somewhere in life, except that those around him pay little or no attention to him at all. This drives him to conconct some wayward plan to remove the main thing that's kept him where he is: his wife, Eva. All things are going swimmingly until a chance-meeting with their new neighbours shifts his whole world to one where anything ridiculous and downright unbelievable ends up making a lot of sense.

It's the effortless way that Tom Sharpe interlocks the characters and circumstances in his books that makes them so addictive. I've never read a book where I literally burst out laughing, only to have to sink deeper into my seat to avoid the quizzical looks from those around me. I loved Blott On The Landscape and Porterhouse Blue (and I didn't think he could top them!), but Wilt is by far the best one I've read...and judging by the reviews that Amazon readers have been giving his other books, it seems the journey for me has just begun.

Those who don't know about Tom Sharpe and his books, I think they have missed one of the best entertainment a written book can provide.

Tom Sharpe, in my view, is simply the best writer in his class of novels.

When I read this book, I was in the solitude of my study, sitting on my favorite chair and laughing till tears rolled from my eyes and my ribs became sore. The only time I got my eyes of the book was when my mum came to the door and inquired, "Are you allright in there?"

Wilt began Tom Sharpe's peculiar and irreverant view of life that is expanded throughout all his books since. One step outside the normal leads to two steps and before we know it we are in a parallel universe of the absurd that is very, very funny, outrageous, and essentially human, warts and all. Tom Sharpe has inspired some of the best new humour writer's of today. I think particularly of Robert Fox, who in Red Fox Goose Green takes the everyday in English village life -- the fox hunt, the church service, the pub -- and breathes Tom Sharpe style farce into the institutions that made Britain what it is.

I loved this book because of how organic the comedy is in the world Sharpe creates. The quirky (semi-relatable) characters get themselves into preposterous situations-- but it all makes sense in the framework of the story. Wilt tweaks reality ever so slightly and the result is a laugh out loud book.