Wilt

Rating:
Summary: I laughed like I was crazy....
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: I laughed like I was crazy....
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic clever, witty and dirty British humor...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Out Loud Funny
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best humorous books on Planet Earth!!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a superb comic novel
Review: 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.