MY UNCLE OSWALD (Mass Market Paperback)

This story takes place around 1912, when Oswald is barely seventeen. In spite of his young age, he is already a great diplomat and communicator. When he hears about a mysterious African beetle that, when stamped to powder, increases a man's potency highly, he's the first to go on expedition to Africa and get hold of some of these beetles. He accomplishes his mission and gets back to Europe where he sells his 'high-potency pills' at exorbitant prices to noble people from all over the world. But then he realizes there's much more (money) to get. Oswald then develops an ultimately ridiculous plan. Take a look at the cover if you're curious about it, I'd say. Anyway, to execute this plan he needs help. He picks out two people as his sidekicks: a chemist called A.R. Woresley and his schoolmate Yasmin Howcomely, "a girl absolutely soaked in sex" as Dahl describes it. And off they go for their mission...

While Oswald is presented as a great bon vivant in the beginning, I need to say that his person changes during the story. At the start he's an audacious boy who fears nobody and even dares to challenge older ladies, but during the second part of the story Oswald is mainly a witness of Yasmin's actions. He has become a businessman who lets others do the work for him. And as with real businessmen, not everything goes as they had planned it... But in the end any kind of character development doesn't matter all that much, for this novel is just a very humorous story that made me laugh as I'd seldom did before with any book. The undertaken actions, and especially the way Dahl describes these, are incredibly funny. You're really in for a (hopefully positive) shock if you haven't read anything like this before. I can absolutely recommend this book for anyone who likes a very lucid and deliciously weird read.

I read somewhere that Dahl was embarassed about this book being published but it is an entertaining read.

The book is quite short, and is a continuation of one of his short stories.

Dahl always gets to the point in his writing, as he does so here with a kind of soft core porno novel. Naturally there is a liberal dosage of black humour from Dahl also.

I would recommend this book, as Dahl is in my opinion a hugely original and exceptional author, the likes of which we will not see again for 100 years.