Books: My Uncle Oswald, by Roald Dahl

Yay, fun! Everything you loved about Matilda (if you're a girl) or James and the Giant Peach (if you're a boy) when you were a kid, modified slightly to please your adult tastes. Windy descriptions of bread with jam become descriptions of lobster and wine (Dahl belies a hedonistic tenderness for gastronomy to which I have always related, and one of Matilda's most memorable moments was (giant chocolate cake aside), the use of Miss Honey's margarine consumption to describe her financial condition). Sophomoric capers, like the newt in the teacher's water pitcher, turn coed, when the narrator has his, um, knockers sucked down the bath drain thanks to the wiles of a tricky little trollop. Wealth comes easily and is taken lightly, failures are accepted because successes always follow, and little racing cars zip about the countryside with ease.

The added value, in this book, comes from its (very liberal) historical quotations. The protagonist/narrator (Uncle Oswald), with sexpot Yasmin (picture Eva Green, halfway between The Dreamers and Casino Royale) at his side, traipse around England and the Continent, collecting the sperm of great and famous men after a third business partner, a Chemistry professor at Oxford (which school Oswald attends), discovers a way to freeze sperm and preserve it indefinitely. Oswald is creating the very first sperm bank, and, being a great capitalist, plans to collect only the sperm of very great men, which will, after their deaths, be available at exorbitant prices to wealthy ladies so that they might make themselves little genius babies. It being the nineteen-teens, there is no other way to get these great men to give their sauce unwittingly except to employ Yasmin to drug them with a mysterious ur-hyper-Viagra, made from the dried and pulverized bodies of Sudanese beetles (yes, early in the book, Oswald travels to Khartoum to purchase a huge supply of this powder, with which he ultimately makes his fortune), entertain them the nine minutes the drug requires to instigate an undeniable stiffy, wrestle them into the "mackintosh" (once Yasmin calls it a tea cosy, another time tells her victim that it was an invention of Oscar Wilde, designed to enhance pleasure), and, well, um, collect their deposits. If the powder's effect is too strong, and the men refuse to cease their pounding after she's gotten the goods, Yasmin stabs their behinds with a hatpin.

But again, the added value comes specifically from the enumeration of these great men, and Dahl's descriptions of their sexual capers: Renoir and Monet, Puccini and Stravinsky, Freud, Einstein, and Proust (Proust is a great one; particularly because I stopped reading the painfully tedious and neurasthenic Within a Budding Grove to read this salacious tale instead). There are others, too, including a good dose of royalty (the King of Spain, too lazy to move his pelvis during the act, has had a sort of vibrating couch rigged up with clockwork (requiring winding, of course)). Fun fun fun; quirky, English, saucy. Would make a great randy indie film.