The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

There's scarcely a page's worth of Tristram's life in this satirical novel outside of a mad dash through France, but perhaps there's some of his opinions. Sterne's joke is that Tristram gets so terribly sidetracked into setting up the background for launching into his autobiography, he never really gets around to it. We are introduced to the circumstances of Tristram's birth - but then there comes an aside while he auctions his biography's dedication, and then come several details about the midwife who served at his birth; then about the parson who paid for her credentials; then the story of the parson's horse ... and already we are getting nowhere fast. Another 500 pages of this lies ahead. It can frustrate or amuse, and may often do show more both.

There's all kinds of playfulness with exploring the limitations of literature, and in drawing comparisons with the strengths and weaknesses of other forms of art. The novel was a new and exciting form in the 1700s and Sterne was happy to indulge, but at the same time refute any thought that it was an ideal medium for delivering all human experience. When he uses a page and a half to describe someone's stance, it's of no matter except to demonstrate how poorly the written word captures what an actor conveys instantly. Similarly when he hums a tune, it demonstrates failure to convey an emotive melody. In addition, this work is littered with 1770s postmodernism: interrupting the narrative with a page of black ink or marbling, interweaving Latin with English translations and Greek footnotes, tossing symbols onto the page to illustrate a point, skipping a chapter or leaving one blank, etc. It's easy to find modern authors who 'push the envelope' (e.g. Lemony Snicket, Mark Danielewski etc.) but this work reveals they only follow Sterne's lead from centuries earlier.

Sterne gets shovelled in alongside Fielding and Richardson as representing the state of literature in his period, but his format links more directly to the satirical works of Swift (especially seen in "A Tale of a Tub"). In that light there's many good bits: the cursing of Obadiah, Slawkenbergius' tale, the adventure of the chestnut, and nearly anything that prompts Uncle Toby to start whistling, to highlight a few. Doctor Slop might be my favourite character for dryly recognizing the nuttiness of the conversation, where even the digressions have their digressions. I anticipated I would find this "novel" either fun or frustrating. I've landed on the fun side but I could have done without Part Seven, and the last two parts contain signs of Sterne's diminishing health. This is a classic I'm glad to have read on paper. The Penguin edition's comprehensive endnotes were helpful, and otherwise I would have missed some of the gags. show less

I find it nearly impossible to review this, since it is one of my favorite novels of all time, makes me laugh even on a crowded Boston, MA bus and is apparently a classic that few people read (at least according to the essay in the back of my Signet Classics edition). Walter and Toby Shandy, Doctor Slop and Corporal Trim are as real to me as my bus companions -- more real, in fact, because at least the characters in Tristram Shandy have emotions.

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I first read Tristram Shandy when I was 23, more than thirty years ago, and still have the slightly mildewed paperback that I picked up off a Cambridge bookstall one day in late 1990. I can’t honestly tell you what happens in it; I can’t find any particular lines that resonate or are very quotable; the most memorable moment is when our hero’s penis gets caught in the windowframe in Book 5 Chapter 17. (Sorry for the spoiler.)

And yet somehow I love it. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time the stream-of-consciousness narrative, the refusal to make many concessions to the reader who wants to know what show more is actually going on, are part of the charm. It’s clearly an inspiration for Joyce, Woolf, and lots of the modernist writers who I really like; but it’s a book of its own time, requiring friendly engagement and repaying that engagement with warmth and humour. show less

It's been called the first post-modernist novel, skipping realism, naturalism, modernism, etc. That is perhaps an exaggeration, but it does seem to be in a class by itself.

I thought Volume VII dragged a bit, taking us out of the Shandy households for an excursion through France. Perhaps the English loved both the critiques of the French and, I'm guessing here, the parody of Continental travelogues of the time.

Overall, it can be a slog and try one's patience, and he seems to rely way too much on references to Burton, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other favorites to convey his opinions. And since I'm not of a mind to investigate the philosophers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries to "get" it, I must withhold any final judgement and show more just say there was some humor there that kept me going. Being very Church of England, Sterne wasn't afraid to criticize Catholicism, especially its more egregious acts in Spain and Portugal, those fun times for the tormenters employed by the Inquisition. show less

What a ride! Tristram Shandy is a complete jumble of frustrating digressions, absurd (Monty Python-esque?) form, laugh-out-loud humor, and philosophical musings on various important topics such as religion, morality, hobbyhorses, and noses. You'll notice I didn't include plot in this list. Indeed, while the novel claims to be about his life, Tristram isn't actually born for the first few volumes - no need to rush things I suppose. But then again, when an author kindly requests that you "cleanse your emunctories" in preparation for a particularly important chapter, relates Slawkenbergius's tale of how a nose sent all of Strassburg into a tizzy, or extols the "unaccountably becalming" effect of fishponds, it's hard to complain.

This is a novel that has, since it’s publication in 1759, divided opinion throughout the ages. It certainly divided mine as you can tell from the review radar below.

While I’m all for authors trying to push the envelope of what a novel can do, such experimentation often comes at a price. In this case, the price to be paid was a great deal of readability and, unless you can excuse an autobiography dedicating hundreds of pages solely to the birth of the protagonist, any sense of plot.

Sterne was both a genius and massively influential. But genii are often unaware of the masses’ need for accessibility, much like most of us are unaware how hard using scissors is for lefties.

I’m not going to lie and say I enjoyed having this read to show more me. I didn’t. In fact, I let out a loud cheer in the car when it finally finished. But in reading further online, I can see quite how foundational this novel was. It set standards for what writers could do, how cheeky they could be, and asked questions of what the novel was fundamentally for.

However, I think it’s more than fair to say that it is foundational to literature in the same way that Leviticus is foundational to Holy Scripture: tediously. show less

I confess, I'm not sure quite how to review Tristram Shandy. Laurence Sterne's masterpiece (first published in nine volumes from 1759 through 1767) is like no other book I've ever read, so it's difficult to even figure out how to evaluate it. It's wonderful, and strange, and frustrating, and hilarious. Piling digression upon digression upon digression, Sterne's narrative (or quasi-narrative) twists and turns, doubling back on itself before suddenly darting forward for a page or two before falling back into a sub-sub-plot (see Sterne's own diagrams of the first five volumes here).

Flouting every 'convention' of print culture (in his own time or our own), Sterne writes, is his goal: "in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself show more neither to his [Horace's]* rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived." And how! Black pages appear, inexplicably, out of nowhere. Some chapters are entirely blank, with only the chapter headings to indicate their existence. Punctuation is decidedly unorothox (a young cousin, peering over my shoulder as I was reading, asked "What are all those lines in there?"). Like Swift, Sterne turns his satirical (or cervantick, as he would have it, meaning satirical plus funny) eye on all aspects of culture, from names to the law to courtship, medicine, language and religion.

He knows exactly what he's doing. In a chapter on digressions (Volume I, Chapter XXII), Sterne declares that these sidelines "incontestably, are the sunshine, ----they are the life, the soul of reading; ----take them out of this book for instance ---- you might as well take the book along with them; ----one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; ----he steps forth like a bridegroom, ----bids All hail; brings in vanity, and forbids the appetite to fail."

It takes an amazing talent to write a book like this that actually carries itself off in a way that works. Sterne does even better than that. Tristram's tales and opinions had me laughing out loud more than once, and constantly itching to find out what was coming next. Simply delightful; if you've never treated yourself to Sterne's works, do take the time.

* Horace famously praised Homer for not beginning The Iliad ab ovo (that is, from the egg). Sterne, of course, does just that.

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