Wilt door Tom Sharpe

1. What is the name of the author?

Tom Sharpe

2. What is the title of the book?

Wilt

3. When was it written?

1976

4. Why did you choose this particular novel?

It was one of the few books available in our local library that has the correct theme.

5. By whom is the story told?

The story is told by the author.

6. When does the story take place and does this influence the story?

The story takes place in the same time it was written. This does not influence the story.

7. How long does the story take?

The story takes one or two weeks.

8. Where does the story take place and does this influence the story?

The story takes place in a town called Ipford. This does not influence the story.

9. What is the theme of the story?

Anti heroes.

10. To which literary genre does the novel belong?

Humour.

11. Give information about the author.

Tom Sharpe wrote three books about the character Henry Wilt. There is ‘Wilt’, ‘The Wilt Alternative’ and ‘Wilt on High’. He also wrote books like ‘Porterhouse Blue’, ‘The Great Pursuit’, ‘Vintage Stuff’ and many more.

12. What is your opinion of the novel? Give arguments.

I think this is a very good novel. It was very easy to read and the dialogues were very funny. The story was very original and very enjoyable.

13. Make a short summary of the novel.

Henry Wilt has a boring life. He teaches Liberal Studies at the local tech for several years, but he never gets promoted. He also hates his wife, Eva Wilt. On one day Eva Wilt meets a woman, Sally Pringsheim. She is an American and thinks that women must stand up against their husbands. Sally invites Eva and Henry for a barbeque. At the barbeque Henry gets pretty drunk. Sally takes advantage of that and takes Henry to an upstairs bedroom. Here she asked Henry to have sex with her. Henry refuges this and wants to walk away. But because he was drunk he fainted. When he woke up he found himself stuck in a inflatable sex doll without any clothes. After some struggle in the bathroom he released himself, but everybody saw him with the doll, Eva too. Henry went home, but Eva stayed at the Pringsheims. The next morning Henry went to work and when he got back Eva wasn’t home. He found a note. The note said that she was away for a while with Sally and Gaskell (husband of Sally) Pringsheim. With the note Henry found the inflatable doll. He got very angry and he wanted to kill Eva. He made a plan and he wanted to practise it with the doll. He dressed the doll with clothes of Eva and drove to the tech. They were making a building across the tech and Henry wanted to throw his wife in a hole which the construction workers would fill up with cement. The hole was big enough for his wife he found out, but the doll felt in a hole and Henry couldn’t get the doll out. He left it for what it was and went home. He didn’t want to kill his wife anymore. The next day the construction workers filled the hole with cement, but in a split second they saw the doll, but they thought it was a woman. The police found notes from Henry at the construction yard. Henry told them everything but they didn’t believe him. They questioned Henry for a week without success. Meanwhile Eva was on a boat with the Pringsheims. But the boat got stuck on a mud bank and they were stuck on a the boat for a few days. On one day Eva heard the truth about Henry and the doll and swum away from the boat. She hided in the house of a Vicar and called the police. Henry was proved innocent.