The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

NA

This was a labor if ever there was one. Early on, I debated abandoning it but decided to stick it out since it's supposed to be a pillar of our literature. There are some funny bits, and surely it was audacious for its time, but this was about as much of a slog as I've worked through. ( )

Silliness. Stuff and nonsense.
Inspired, metatextual, unbeatable silliness. ( )

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 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. ( )

So...this book is one giant joke constructed of smaller jokes and it takes the mick out of nigh on everything; novels, novelists, travel, travel writers, army officers, doctors, clergymen, amours, marriage, you name it, and not least readers.

Considered by some to be the first Modernist novel, appearing nearly two centuries before the term was coined, there's no over-all plot and only a few episodes that could really constitute something approaching a sub-plot, there are blank chapters, a space for one to do a portrait of one of the characters and other visual puns, including one on the structure of the book itself and on and on but the main approach is to digress; the digressions pile one on another so high that we don't get to the titular character's birth until about p250...it all crazy, irreverent, scandalous for the time (especially being written by a member of the clergy) and very, very silly if one just goes along with the mood and drops any expectation of even the normal conventions of the novel of the period, let alone the present day.

But - there had to be one, right? But, after a while the jokes wear thin through repetition, the later stages dragging because of it. Originally released as nine books over a period of years, contemporaries could not have done what we all do now and pick it up as a single volume and try to read it from start to finish in one focused push - and that was to its advantage. Serial publication meant one could not over-dose very easily, which I did despite taking months of not really hurrying. It might be better read as originally published; as nine separate books spread out over a much longer period of time than I took. ( )