I am beginning, once again, to have an urge to salute my Uncle Oswald. I mean, of course, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius deceased, the connoisseur, the bon vivant, the collector of spiders, scorpions and walking sticks, the lover of opera, the expert on Chinese porcelain, the seducer of women, and without much doubt the greatest fornicator of all time. Every other celebrated contender for that title is diminished to a point of ridicule when his record is compared with that of my Uncle Oswald. Especially poor old Casanova.
The book is framed by concept of Uncle Oswald’s stories being in diary form that he left to an unnamed nephew in a series of bound volumes. The book commences with the nephew recounting how he first published excerpts in 1964 and waited ten years “before risking the release of a second piece.” This is the opening paragraph and the nephew’s characterization of Oswald pretty much sums him up completely. Though complicated, he is not a complex person. His life pretty much revolves around the pursuit of sexual conquest to the point that his lasting legacy of existence is a multi-volume journal that is mostly a recounting of those conquests.
I have never once throughout these journals made any mention of the manner in which I became a wealthy man. Perhaps the time has come when I should do this. I think it has. For although these diaries are designed to be a history of the art of seduction and the pleasures of copulation, they would be incomplete without some reference also to the art of money-making and the pleasures attendant thereon. Very well, then. I have talked myself into it. I shall proceed at once to tell you something about how I set about making money. But just in case some of you may be tempted to skip this particular section and go on to juicier things, let me assure you that there will be juice in plenty dripping from these pages. I wouldn’t have it otherwise.
As soon as the narrative switches over to the voice of Oswald writing in his journals, he proceeds to tell the reader what this section of the diary is going to be about. Thus the book readers hold in their hands carry the promise—as stated above—that the story they are about to read is one in which Uncle Oswald spills the secret of how to become wealthy. The introduction by the nephew indicates that this story is extracted singularly from Volume XX of the “Diaries of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius.” What Uncle Oswald promises in his journal entry above constitutes the first page of the novel. Keep that in mind.
I promised at the beginning of this diary to tell you how I became a wealthy man. I have taken a long time so far in telling you how I did not succeed. Let me therefore make up for lost time and describe to you in no more than a few paragraphs how I did in the end become a real multimillionaire. The great idea that came to me suddenly in Dunroamin was as follows:
What “follows” is the actual revelation of how Oswald became rich. It constitutes exactly four paragraphs, each shorter than the one that came before and together all four paragraphs comprise the entirety of Oswald’s story about “how I set about making money.” One page later the novel comes to an end. So what starts out as a promise to tell how a man became wealthy becomes around two-hundred pages of digressions before circling around back to the point. Compared to Uncle Oswald, Grampa Simpson—no onion-wearing walking-bird himself—is a mere amateur in the art of digressing far away from the point, which was the style at the time.
