Halfway between John kennedy toole y Charles Bukowski, and taking the best of each one, we find a Tom sharpe Manager narrate life as a kind of grotesque to the British with South African reminiscences and even Hispanic evocations, as he ended his days in the Girona town of Llafranch.
Without reaching the extreme ridicule of Ignatius Really, Kennedy Toole's great character in The Confederacy of Dunces, nor immersing himself in the acid humor and the corrosive, dirty and irreverent vision of the world of Henry Chinaski, alter ego of Charles Bukowski, the great Tom Sharpe knew how to decompose, in most of his works, all those labels of moral superiority and even educational of which the wealthy classes boasted with a point of cultural overactivity.
Nothing better than an anthropologist to carry out a literary dissection of the world he lived in, of a society always moved by its intense contradictions between appearances and ultimate motivations ...
And why not do it with humor? Why not shout again that the emperor is naked to the astonishment of the people? With that corrosive point that accompanies the mature humor back from everything, Tom Sharpe made us, and makes us enjoy with characters like Wilt, certainly a protagonist not as valued as he really should, at the height of the greatest.
Here I rescue a volume from July 2020 that collects everything written by Sharpe about his great Wilt:
Thanks mainly to Wilt, but also to many other protagonists of other sagas, Tom Sharpe was able to present us with a story that pointed to the police or the mystery to end up equipping a story of hilarious humor, with that touch of bitterness that can remain after a laugh on the miseries of the human being ..
Top 3 Recommended Tom Sharpe Novels
Want
As I say, Wilt is a type of that other side of the mirror of our reality, a character who should occupy a preferential seat in the stalls where the imagination of so many writers arranges their creations so that they end up contemplating the world. And Don Quixote, Ignatius Really, Gregorio Samsa or Max Estrella don't laugh while they observe the ridiculousness of reality, that construction of subjective wills, drives and contradictions buried like victims of a separate novel.
Anyway, digressions aside, in this novel we meet the eccentric Wilt at that precise moment in which he finally gives free rein to all his eccentricities, that moment of liberation in which Wilt discovers that it is not worth continuing with the farce. the plot with an inflatable doll, which if I remember correctly appears buried in the same school where Wilt works, or with some police officers dazzled by the happiness of a man on the verge of a catastrophe, invites us to laugh at that absurdity I was talking about before. .
A grotesque spread to the educational system with the excuse of a professor Wilt in full effervescence. In general it is a scenario about the ridiculous that can be projected to any environment, although focused in this case on classist England. A novel about the variability of the principles that Groucho Marx pointed to, and if you don't like those principles, you can always resort to others...
The great investigation
From the cacophony of a protagonist named Frederick Frensic we enter a novel about the stridency of the world of culture and literature to be more specific.
The Book Industry is home to the strangest beings, moved by all kinds of impulses, from sexual to patrimonial. When the literary agent Frederick Frensic reads the novel "Pause, oh men, before the virgin", a title that he would never invite to reading and that finally ends up being a work that Frederick defines as the summit of the narrative.
Only after the manuscript he meets an author who does not want to reveal his name. And of course the matter ends up being a real candy for all the monsters in a sector driven by reputational interests that hide pecuniary needs and that harbor unspeakable desires for profit with which to conquer the world of culture. So when the string of characters come into action around this book and its publication, we enjoy encounters that are as hurtful as they are hilarious, with characters who do not detract from each other in their humorous greatness of ridiculousness and are capable of killing, burning or shooting. to anyone to get that bit of glory that they think they have always deserved.
The fearsome Blott
I could end this ranking with any of Wilt's sequels, but it never hurts to delve into the depths of an author's bibliography to continue finding new scenarios that provide fresh air and that discover the virtuoso of humor open to a greater range of more amazing options.
To a large extent, Sharpe's narrative success lies in his comic revision of the tragic, in his ease in presenting humorous and critical plots. The triangle between Lay Maud, her husband Sir Lynchwood, who leaves the Sir in the trunk as soon as he leaves home, and the gardener Blott, who projects on Lay Maud his deepest desires for prosperity and pleasure, points to one of those comic implosions that are completed with a dismayed society with the sum of events and obscenities that rouse their morale and prepare them for a modern witch burning that can end them all.
Other recommended Tom Sharpe books…
ancestral vices
The story begins the day an English tycoon decides to give free rein to his twisted evil to direct it against none other than his own relatives and partners of the multinational that he presides over. To do this he will use the services of who in theory is his main enemy, a university professor with a leftist ideology and notable naivety for the things of life, whom he commissions to write a history of his family.
But if the start is already crazy, the development will be crazy. The automatic wheelchair used by old Lord Petrefact will take on a life of its own; The professor will feel erotically stimulated by a subnormal woman who decorates his kitchen with photos of muscular men; Someone will commit an involuntary crime and all signs will point to an innocent person.
And this is just a brief summary of the series of absurdities that follow one another in this story of Machiavellian revenge and repressed passions, of confusions and setbacks, falls and disasters, in which Tom Sharpe proves to be in top form, as capable as he is. always weaving the wildest plot and leading it to the most outrageous end.
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