Laurence Sterne Books

_Laurence Sterne: A Life_ (Oxford University Press), by Ian Campbell Ross, is a dandy new biography which I will tell you about. But the only real reason to be reading about Sterne is to increase appreciation of his wonderful book, _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman_, which has been making people laugh for almost two and a half centuries. So let me make the recommendation first of that book to you, if you have never read it. Go read it, and when you finish, I'll be right here.

There! What did I tell you? Intelligent, chaotic, witty amusement, with some bawdiness thrown in. I don't need to tell you of the thousand odd attractions of the book. It is one of the most fun of the classics. Now to the fine book at hand. Sterne was, Ross shows, just as peculiar as his book, and had as chaotic a life. Sterne lived only eight years after bursting onto the scene with _Tristram Shandy_, and to Ross's credit, he has made Sterne's pre-Shandy years interesting. Sterne had led a modest, impecunious life of a vicar in Yorkshire. He did a bit of political writing, but nothing that would have prepared anyone for his comic masterpiece. He had an unhappy marriage, and a remarkable interest in adultery.

Then in 1759, the first two of the nine volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were published, and caused a sensation. The reviews were very good, and if readers were puzzled by the extraordinary digressions and puzzles in the book, they laughed at them, and they bought them up. Then Sterne appeared in London, and was delighted to wear his black ministerial garments everywhere. This brought his book notoriety as well as fame; reviewers changed tone from praising the book's hilarity to criticizing the vicar for writing "downright gross and obscene expressions." Sterne became a hot ticket at dinners and salons. The zany mixture of adventures and accidents, farcical and sad, reflected the life of the author.

This was an odd man, to be sure, who produced an odd book. Ross's elegant and thorough biography brings Sterne to life for our age. The gregarious James Boswell wrote that Sterne was "the best companion I ever knew," and those who find him to be a good companion in the form of his famous book will find him an even better one after reading this illuminating biography.

A line from the movie "adaptation" put it best: this was a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post to.

Simply put, Laurence Sterne threw out all the literary conventions of what a novel should be and how it should be arranged, a few hundred years before more recent writers like Calvino, Joyce and Danielewski did. The result is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," a gloriously rambling, richly entertaining sort-of-novel.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me." So begins Tristram, who starts his life story with his "begetting," and attempts to tell the story of his birth and life, as well as the descriptions of relatives -- his lovable uncle Toby, his eccentric dad, his patient mother (who's in labor for most of the book).

But as he tries to tell us about his life, Tristram keeps getting sidetracked by all the stories that surround him -- his uncle's romance with the Widow Wadman and the war in which he received a nasty wound in a sensitive spot, the French, the doctor who delivered him, letters in multiple languages, the parson, the personal history of the midwife, and what curses are appropriate for what occasions.

Most novels are pretty straightforward -- they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" totally ignores that, by having a beginning that lasts for the whole book, dozens of "middles," and no real end (it just stops at a suitable spot). All of this is without a real structure.

And he took this postmodern, break-all-the-rules mentality all the way, by including odd little illustrations -- when speaking of the death of Parson Yorick, Sterne includes a black page. Random empty pages. Asterisks instead of important paragraphs. And a bunch of squiggly lines to demonstrate precisely how the narratives in previous chapters looked.

At first glance, Sterne's writing style was pretty typical of his period -- detailed, somewhat formal in tone, and very talky. It takes a little while for Tristram to start dipping out of of his narrative -- at one point, he starts interrupting himself in midsentence. By the middle of the book, he's completely lost control of his own story.

And he twisted it around with lots of bawdy humor (such as poor Uncle Toby's groin injury, which causes quite a few problems), and the continuous comic stumbles of all the characters. On the subject of his own name, Tristram describes his dad's reaction: "Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which to his ears was unison to Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.")

Life is too rich to be encapsulated in a single story -- that's the problem with "Tristram Shandy," whose story is a classic comic delight of premodernist-postmodern skill.

Have you ever wanted to read a book where the author decides to "rip out" one of the chapters, or leaves a blank page for you to 'draw' one of the characters? Would you enjoy an 18th-Century story which takes many chapters before the hero is born? The tale is touchingly told. The characters are real, and constantly fascinating. It's not their fault that their story is frequently interrupted by outlandish "digressions" on the part of an author so creative that his modern descendants are considered to be Joyce and Beckett as well as many others. Would you enjoy a chapter about Chapters? About buttonholes? About whether parents and their children are kin to each other? A chapter on curses? Laurence Sterne has so much trouble getting Walter and Toby Shandy downstairs that he calls in the "critics" to do it. Advice on reading such an unusual, even unique book: read the first several chapters, then stop and reread them. Continue that process and soon the book will feel quite familiar, and that's when the fun starts! Walter loves arguments about anything. Uncle Toby enjoys building military models. Tristram is quite busy just trying to get born and baptized with the correct name. His mother Elizabeth argues with her husband Walter about midwives and their methods. (Their wedding contract is here for you to peruse...it causes some problems itself.) This volume "3" consists of the Notes on the text (which is found in volumes "1" and "2".) Amazon also lists several less expensive paperback editions of the novel, the preferred one being the Oxford World Classics Edition.

Laurence Sterne may have been one of the most peculiar authors who ever lived. Spending most of his life as a provincial Anglican clergyman (albeit a randy one) with a wife he didn't get along with and on whom he cheated compulsively, troubled by the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, he became famous overnight in his mid-forties with the publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1760. While Sterne has never lacked for either admirers or detractors (some of the former are Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf; examples of the latter are Samuel Johnson and William Makepeace Thackeray), he has somehow survived as one of the magnificent oddities of English literature.

Since the 1970s, Sterne's greatest champion has been Dr. Melvyn New of the University of Florida, whose edition of Sterne's Works has become the standard texts of Tristram Shandy and his Sermons. Now Dr. New has added a sixth volume to the series, consisting of A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal.

At the time Sterne began A Sentimental Journey in 1767 (he never finished it -- what we have are the first two volumes of a projected four), he was at a crossroads in his career as a writer. The later volumes of Tristram Shandy had not sold as well or caused the stir of the earlier volumes, and Sterne may have felt that he had taken its strain of satiric ribaldry as far as it could go -- at any rate, he decided to change course, and to indulge in the then-popular mode of fictional pathos. To elicit a furtive tear, rather than a sly guffaw, was now his aim, and whether this was simple careerism or a genuine change of heart is for each reader to decide (although the evidence of the Bramine's Journal, never intended for publication, indicates that the latter was most likely the case).

The text of A Sentimental Journey doesn't present insurmountable difficulties (Sterne, unlike Swift, always scrupulously prepared his works for the press, and in any event Dr. New has the precedent, graciously acknowledged, of Gardner Stout's 1967 University of California Press edition), but the Florida edition, as impeccable as its scholarship is, is more interesting for what it doesn't do than for what it does. Unlike the Stout edition, in which a tiny island of text can be overwhelmed by a tsunami of annotation, New's Florida text is unencumbered by its nonetheless impressive scholarly apparatus, which is printed in the back. Dr. New is that academic rarity -- a scholar who actually gives a damn about the non-scholarly reader. The result, as with the rest of the Florida Sterne, is an edition that manages to have it both ways -- impeccable scholarship that does not overwhelm a text that is presented in a way so that it can be enjoyed for its own sake. Would that there were more editors like him.

Sterne is the poet of nuance (although at times his more earthy side takes over -- at one point he asks a woman hidden from him by a curtain "if she wanted anything," and gets back the reply, "Rien que pisser," which means just what you think it means), and there are times when the more lachrymal sentiments of the late 18th Century, so trendy then, feel strained now. But he sometimes managed to combine his empathy for others with his appreciation of the odd and the grotesque, as when he notices, at the opera comique, a dwarf with his view blocked by a "tall, corpulent German, near seven feet high, who stood directly betwixt him and all possibility of his seeing either the stage or the actors."

Mostly, however, A Sentimental Journey is about the exhilarating minutiae of traveling, unencumbered (as Sterne was at times when he made the journeys in France and Italy that inspired the book) by either wife of child, and moving through, as he mentions several times, a country with which his own was, at that time, at war. "I seldom go to the place I set out for," Sterne comments at one point, and the unpredictability of his peregrinations make the book feel more like life, and less like literature, than most books of his time -- or even ours. He can manage a delicacy of feeling combined with an intricacy of expression that make him seem a precursor of Proust.

The other work contained in the volume, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal (one wishes that Dr. New had been a tad less pedantically accurate and chosen instead the less holographically correct but inarguably more effective title that Sterne biographer Wilbur L. Cross gave it: the Journal to Eliza) is a diary kept by Sterne in the last year of his life and intended for a 23-year-old married woman named Eliza Draper, with whom Sterne had become hopelessly infatuated (an infatuation all the more hopeless since the lady's husband was in Bombay, where Eliza would soon join him). At their parting Sterne began keeping a journal that he assumed would be reciprocated by Eliza, and that at some point they would meet again and share their respective sentiments. Never published during his lifetime, it makes Sterne seem either hopelessly romantic or more than a little pathetic -- depending, I suppose, on one's age and/or gender. At any event, Sterne never saw Eliza again.

Together, these two works of the final year of Sterne's life give us both an impressive and moving Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man, and Dr. New and the University Press of Florida are to be congratulated for their persistence in putting out, over a period of three decades, so splendid an edition of a classic author. This latest volume more than lives up to the high standards of the previous five, and should be read by anyone even remotely curious about one of the most curious and brilliant authors ever to write in English.

The fragmentary structure of _TS_ is ideally suited to Rowson's comic-book reinterpretation. This accomplished editorial cartoonist pokes fun at 'heritage' illustration and costume drama, instead matching Sterne's words with his lively images and contemporary, knowing commentary. Though he shows an affectionate regard for the original, Rowson is not afraid to bring to his own work a brand of mockery not far from Sterne's.

In comparison with John Baldessari's recent photo-collages illustrating the same novel, Rowson is much funnier, more accessible, and more faithful to the spirit of the original.

In summary, a very funny, very successful re-interpretation of this sometimes difficult classic. Rotund Walter Shandy is a particulary appealing figure.

Contains some obscenity (though justified).

Tristram Shandy is a novel about human understanding. One of the things that Sterne believed about humanity is that things were constantly changing; always in flux, if you will. Historically speaking, he was of the Lockian generation which displaced uman understanding into two categories, wit and association. Sterne was a believer in association, and attributed to that the idea of the "hobby-horse." This meant the menial quirks that each and every human had, such is the case with the sexual expeditions of the characters within. With the idea of human flux and the hobby-horse, we are brought to the "marble page," which is, in and of itself, a hermeneutical circle for defining the rest of the book. Sterne presents this page to illustrate uniqueness of individuals and the unpredeictability of the process of writing. Which brings me to my next point, the concept of narrative failure. Throughout the strange goings on of the book, we come to points in the writing in which Sterne includes the reader into the disorder of the narrative. In Volume IV, Sterne mentions the process of the book in which he has done one year of writing, and yet come only to the first day of his life. This is the failure he is showing us, and the manner in which he creates this outrageous tale. These two aspects of Tristram Shandy are intrical in understanding and enjoying the chaos of this book.

this book is kinda boring and confusing. you really have to hang in there to get to the good stuff - which is scarce.

if youre into funny witty avante guard roots lit. make sure you read rabelais, cervantes, diderot, swift, voltaire, debergerac, lucian, erasmus and the Anatomy of Melancholy FIRST.

otherwise you might inadvertantly over-rate nash... or even worse, get turned off to reading all together.

(thats funny, I called Sterne "Nash" on accident - I guess Shandy reminds me of Nash's unfortunate traveller - another uneven boring book with flashes of brilliance)

It is curious to observe that the "novel" of the XVIII Century has much more in common with the novels of the XX than with those of the XIX. Structure, tone, introspection, playfulness, jumps in Time, typographic and other experiments, have more to do with the modern novels of the XX Century "isms", as well, of course, with the work of Rabelais and Cervantes, predecessors and acknowledged influences of this hilarious, humanistic and great book. The story presents tales within tales, and it "progresses" in spirals, with different threads interweaving like DNA chains which bring about a living being: Tristram Shandy. Through these games with Time, rhythm and direction, we learn not so much about the life and times of Tristram, but of his family. Well into the book Tristram apologizes for not having been born just yet, but we don't care because we are immersed in the prosaic yet magical world of the father, Walter, as well as of Uncle Toby and his servant, Corporal Trim, the male-midwife, the parson, Widow Wadman, and other characters as outrageous as the next. The book is a funny digression on subject after subject, some of them with no apparent connection to the main thread. We learn about Uncle Toby's and Trim's monomania for recreating, in the garden, the fortress sieges of William III's wars in Flanders and the Netherlands. Or the obsession of Shandy Sr. with big noses, whose size is related to other parts of the anatomy. The closing part is the story of Widow Wadman's efforts to conquer the naive Toby, similar to his sieges.

The book develops in a continuous joy of digression, of pure literary pleasure, full of the most obscure erudite references worth reading in an annotated edition. The characters are perfect caricatures, full of humanity and good humour. Everything is subject of derision and mockery. One thing that makes it particularly memorable is the odd couple of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. Their absolute innocence, their boundless good faith, their devouted and manly friendship, make them a perfect British mirror of Don Quixote and Sancho, in their also perpetual assault on fortresses, as well military as temporal and verbal. A great ludic exercise of an obscure, and suddenly famous, parson from York, who has scandalized and amused generations of grateful readers.

A line from the movie "adaptation" put it best: this was a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post to.

Simply put, Laurence Sterne threw out all the literary conventions of what a novel should be and how it should be arranged, a few hundred years before more recent writers like Calvino, Joyce and Danielewski did. The result is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," a gloriously rambling, richly entertaining sort-of-novel.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me." So begins Tristram, who starts his life story with his "begetting," and attempts to tell the story of his birth and life, as well as the descriptions of relatives -- his lovable uncle Toby, his eccentric dad, his patient mother (who's in labor for most of the book).

But as he tries to tell us about his life, Tristram keeps getting sidetracked by all the stories that surround him -- his uncle's romance with the Widow Wadman and the war in which he received a nasty wound in a sensitive spot, the French, the doctor who delivered him, letters in multiple languages, the parson, the personal history of the midwife, and what curses are appropriate for what occasions.

Most novels are pretty straightforward -- they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" totally ignores that, by having a beginning that lasts for the whole book, dozens of "middles," and no real end (it just stops at a suitable spot). All of this is without a real structure.

And he took this postmodern, break-all-the-rules mentality all the way, by including odd little illustrations -- when speaking of the death of Parson Yorick, Sterne includes a black page. Random empty pages. Asterisks instead of important paragraphs. And a bunch of squiggly lines to demonstrate precisely how the narratives in previous chapters looked.

At first glance, Sterne's writing style was pretty typical of his period -- detailed, somewhat formal in tone, and very talky. It takes a little while for Tristram to start dipping out of of his narrative -- at one point, he starts interrupting himself in midsentence. By the middle of the book, he's completely lost control of his own story.

And he twisted it around with lots of bawdy humor (such as poor Uncle Toby's groin injury, which causes quite a few problems), and the continuous comic stumbles of all the characters. On the subject of his own name, Tristram describes his dad's reaction: "Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which to his ears was unison to Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.")

Life is too rich to be encapsulated in a single story -- that's the problem with "Tristram Shandy," whose story is a classic comic delight of premodernist-postmodern skill.

"Tristram Shandy" may be the most influential comic novel in the English language. Its influence can be seen in works as different as Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children," Carlos Fuentes's "Christoper Unborn," and, of course, Joyce's "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake". Indeed, the "Wake" would probably not have been possible without the comic freedom bequeathed to his descendants by the good Rev. Sterne. Influence aside, however, this is also one of the funniest and most impressive novels ever written IN ANY LANGUAGE. Obsessively self-referential, it reads like a postmodern novel written two centuries before Derrida. Maniacally, outrageously comical, it's the book the members of 'Monty Python' might have written had they been a group of 18th-century litterateurs.

Imagine a book filled with em dashes separated by the occasional non sequitur. There you have TS, a jumble of a hodgepodge of a melange. Occasionally delightful turns of phrase notwithstanding, TS is recommended only to bookish masochists interested in dogs of the shaggy persuasion. (Sterne's Sentimental Journey, on the other hand, is a masterpiece.)

Like Sterne's other works, _A Sentimental Journey_ is extraordinarily playful. His works are the eighteenth century's postmodernist works of play. They have lots of textual puzzles and tend toward the absurd. For example, the Mr. Yorick of the _Journey_ is also a character in Sterne's major novel _Tristram Shandy_ and is also the name under which he publishes his own sermons (he was a clergyman). The text is very "fragmentary" and the novel even jokes about that itself, labelling parts of itself "fragment." In these ways, the _Journey_ is fun and modern.

But it is also indicative of an important eighteenth-century trend--sensibility or sentimentalism. All eras have their debates about the relationshp between the individual and society and this is one eighteenth-century answer. This opinion has nothing to do with "rights" but everything to do with "sympathy." Mr. Yorick, the "sentimental traveller," relates to other human beings through sympathetic physical responses, most notably the "pulses" and "beats" of his heart and hands for various women.

Therefore, this book is a good way to get into a very different historical mindset while at the same time seeing the roots of some of the literary forms of today.

This autobiographical acount by Sterne of his amorous progress through France and Northern Italy is surely one of the most delightful books ever written. Composed as he lay dying of tuberculosis, the book nonetheless encaptures the author's renowned zest for life as well as the libertine spirit of the age in which he lived. The journey down through France to Northern Italy is the perfect vehicle for an excursion into the nature of human sensibility, and from the moment that this cultured Anglo-Irish cleric sets foot in Calais, the reader is treated to a seies of exquisite encounters with the fairer sex. Rarely has an author transmitted so well his understanding of the psychological complexity of women, or the pleasure he takes in their company. Engaging, perceptive and witty, this is a book whiich cannot fail to leave an imprint on the imagination.

Even for modern readers, "A Sentimental Journey" (published 1768)is as startlingly innovative as Sterne's celebrated "Tristram Shandy". Sterne's ability to crystallize the minute details of experience - which may be down to a few seconds only - is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse". Indeed, Woolf admired this book.

This is by no means an easy read. The 18th-century prose is difficult; the book is larded with Frenchisms and Biblical or classical allusions; the complex, slow narrative often requires re-reading. But the rewards are great! It's wise, deeply comical, and incredibly perceptive.

There are several helpful reviews below dealing with the aspect of "sentimentality", and so I will just single out two things which appealed to me:

1. STERNE AND BODY LANGUAGE. Sterne shows an almost 20th-century appreciation of body language. In fact, I believe he might have been the first to identify it as such. His chapter, "The Translation", highlights the importance of being able to interpret subtle physical hints, like a language: "There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this _shorthand_, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words." How visionary!

2. STERNE AND THE FRENCH. Ever since Shakespeare inserted a scene in "cod French" into _Henry V_, actually ever since the Norman Conquest and up to Monty Python and beyond, the English have revelled in mocking the French and their language. His Continental travelling gives Sterne the perfect excuse to do this. At one point he differentiates between "tant pis" (= "never mind" - where there is nothing to be gained) and "tant mieux" (= so much the better - where there IS an advantage). He also has a hilarious section on the grades of French swearing: first "Diable!", then "Peste!" and finally the words that he won't repeat. In all cases, Sterne carefully shows the social niceties of these expressions.

The protagonist, Yorick, has various adventures of lust and feeling with women and other typically travelish things like losing his passport that we can all relate to. He's tender, obscene, learned, funny, companionable, and above all, readable - if tough.

A Sentimental Journey is a fabulous book for so many reasons. Laurence Sterne was an immensely influential writer in the 18th century--his major works, Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy, were responses to the travel narrative and newly born novel, respectively. His writing is essential to scholars of the 18th century--he is referenced in Austen's Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, Brown's The Power of Sympathy, Foster's The Coquette and Tyler's The Contrast. To understand and appreciate his novel is to have a better appreciation and love of the works that built their structures on his foundation. And yet it is original, as Yorick says himself, "both my travels and observations will be altogether of a different cast from any of my fore-runners."

Yet it is not solely for historical benefit that one should read Sentimental Journey. The adventures and amours of Sterne's semi-autobiographical Yorick are delightful. One of the most romantic passages I've read in a book occurs when Yorick inadvertantly takes the hand of a woman and describes in detail the thrill of merely holding it. Granted, hers is not the only hand he will hold, but he writes so wonderfully, candidly and engagingly that it is extremely difficult to hold his passions against the sentimental Yorick. His scene with the starling locked in a cage is pertinent and a touching commentary on slavery. What a guy! My only complaint is the editor of this edition does not feel it necessary to translate the French-of which there is plenty-making some passages difficult to understand at best. However,this is a sentimental journey that I will gladly take over and over.

Sterne befuddles and delights readers and critics alike in A Sentimental Journey. He takes the fashionable travel log of the time and satarizes it. Contemporary critics had a fit over its supposedly bawdy nature, yet some modern readers may over look its sublte innuendo. The form of the novel is quite unlike anything that had preceeded it, thus is important for any scholars. Most importanly, however, the book is funny and fun to read.

What does one even say about Tristram Shandy? Amazing? A bit of fresh air? Challenging? Hysterical? A marvelous satire on the novel (and everything else, literally) that is developed by its digressions and nearly entirely abandons linear plot structure. I have never laughed so hard while reading a classic.

A line from the movie "adaptation" put it best: this was a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post to.

Simply put, Laurence Sterne threw out all the literary conventions of what a novel should be and how it should be arranged, a few hundred years before more recent writers like Calvino, Joyce and Danielewski did. The result is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," a gloriously rambling, richly entertaining sort-of-novel.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me." So begins Tristram, who starts his life story with his "begetting," and attempts to tell the story of his birth and life, as well as the descriptions of relatives -- his lovable uncle Toby, his eccentric dad, his patient mother (who's in labor for most of the book).

But as he tries to tell us about his life, Tristram keeps getting sidetracked by all the stories that surround him -- his uncle's romance with the Widow Wadman and the war in which he received a nasty wound in a sensitive spot, the French, the doctor who delivered him, letters in multiple languages, the parson, the personal history of the midwife, and what curses are appropriate for what occasions.

Most novels are pretty straightforward -- they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" totally ignores that, by having a beginning that lasts for the whole book, dozens of "middles," and no real end (it just stops at a suitable spot). All of this is without a real structure.

And he took this postmodern, break-all-the-rules mentality all the way, by including odd little illustrations -- when speaking of the death of Parson Yorick, Sterne includes a black page. Random empty pages. Asterisks instead of important paragraphs. And a bunch of squiggly lines to demonstrate precisely how the narratives in previous chapters looked.

At first glance, Sterne's writing style was pretty typical of his period -- detailed, somewhat formal in tone, and very talky. It takes a little while for Tristram to start dipping out of of his narrative -- at one point, he starts interrupting himself in midsentence. By the middle of the book, he's completely lost control of his own story.

And he twisted it around with lots of bawdy humor (such as poor Uncle Toby's groin injury, which causes quite a few problems), and the continuous comic stumbles of all the characters. On the subject of his own name, Tristram describes his dad's reaction: "Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which to his ears was unison to Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.")

Life is too rich to be encapsulated in a single story -- that's the problem with "Tristram Shandy," whose story is a classic comic delight of premodernist-postmodern skill.

Post-modernism isn't appreciated as such in the truly post-modern era. This book may have inspired and launched a thousand novels in succeeding generations, but outside of aspiring modern writers who need either justification or inspiration, it really has no place. It's irrelevant, completely unfunny, and as unintellectual as a neo-con's talking points.

My bias: Joyce and Sterne belong in the same bowl to be devoured by artists and fellow writers and happily ignored by most consumers of literature. Maybe we aren't smart enough to enjoy it, but we are intelligent enough to get it. It's just not that fun to struggle through. These are mostly pointless words penned as amusement and should be treated as such. There's little of humanism to reveal here, so let it be what it is: the recreation of a mind unburdened by survival or love. Too bad so much ink was spilled on so little substance.

A book doesnt survive for 240 years if it doesn't have value. I came upon this book because I once had the luck to meet the SF writer John Brunner in a pub, and inter alia he recommended it. The worst (or at any rate most difficult) thing with this book is the punctuation -- sometimes Sterne (the writer) is talking to you, sometimes to somebody off-stage -- sometimes he uses commas to indicate a pause which may take him off in a new direction, sometimes a hyphen. If you can get over all this, you are sitting down to have a chat with the most interesting person you are ever likely to meet, namely Tristram Shandy, who has the driest sense of humour ever wished on a body -- and the most logical (and therefore intensely amusing) father Walter, and the sweetest natured of all uncles (Toby,as narrow in his own way as Walter) whose servant Trim can turn the dropping of a hat into a drama -- and one must not forget his mother, who always wins arguments by never arguing...And yet others. Sterne can stretch the description of single moments to cover pages, and make you burst out laughing at the end of it (or often in the middle). Did Sterne think of his book as a stage play? The characters are brought wonderfully to life,but the narrative unfolds with so many long (usually interesting) asides -- and sometimes asides of asides -- and with such a complicated ebb-and-flow that you probably cannot make sense of it on a proscenium. What's that you ask? -- But what is the plot? -- well, Tristram takes half the book to get born, and a goodly time to be nearly dealt a life-changing blow by a window, and then there is the business of him running faster than Death through France, and the affair of his Uncle Toby with the Widow Wadman...really, you ask too much wanting a plot as well! If you needs must have a plot, I have a fine garden round the back, and you may choose your own, and I will pay my gardener extra to tend it for you.

Many things could be said about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, funny, unique, and off-topic being a few of them. Personally, I would call The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy to be a rant of the longest degree. To prove my point, the main character isn't even born before the end of the second volume. It takes the character one year to write about one day in his life, so even if you enjoyed the book you would never get to read an end.
To be fair, this is one of the first true novels ever written and is the very first stream of consciousness novel to ever be written. So with that in mind, it can go off once in a while on a rant because everyone does that in their own head once in awhile.
The characters are rather creative, ranging from a king to a slightly strange mother, but the side trips get very annoying when you are trying to reach the end of the book. Do you honestly want to know what each person did months before the main character was even born? Do we really need to know what color this was and what Mr. Toby Shandy did to cause misfortune to his unborn son the moment he was conceived?
Personally, this book was far too droning. I would much rather read something with more plot, and less stream of consciousness. I admit that maybe people would probably enjoy reading this book for its unique style, but I can not stand to read it. The tangents are too long and the overall style just isn't for me.
With all that in mind, I say that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a decent book with a good story to tell, and tell... and tell. So if you like older writings with a twisted sense of humor, pick this one up.

When Laurence Sterne, in 1760 wrote the first volume of TRISTRAM SHANDY in what was to be a series of nine, no one had any idea what this new genre of literature was meant to be. The only models that Sterne had were Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, so the field was pretty much wide open in terms of any competitor's choice of content, style, or theme. Sterne noted from these two that their successes were based on their characters' being placed in wildly varying and potentially threatening situations. He took these twin concepts of changeable location and possible harm which he incorporated into the first volume of Tristram Shandy, and then proceeded to turn the incipient world of novel writing over on its very young head. What differentiated this book from those of Fielding and Richardson was Sterne's abandoning the tidy world of the classical insistence on the need for unity. In a style that centuries later would be adopted by Joyce and Proust, Sterne twisted the relation between plot and time into a pretzel. To begin with, the title itself is a misnomer. The titular hero, Tristram, is not even born until midway through the book. He is born, appears briefly, disappears for lengthy periods of time, and then reappears briefly at the end. A more honest title would have been "The Life and Times of the Father and Uncle of Tristram Shandy." It is Walter Shandy, Tristram's father and Toby Shandy, the uncle, who dominate most of the action. And it is not simply a misdirection of who the primary protagonist is to be that gives TRISTRAM SHANDY its off beat flavor. What distinguishes this book from both its predecessors and most of its descendants is Sterne's refusal to use structured time as the unifying glue.

When Sterne presents his action in a manner that seems to defy the laws of causality in that results may precede causes, he does so by his novel use of the association of ideas which act to reconnect threads of thought that are snipped here and spliced there. Such cycles of snipping and splicing lead to digressions such as when in Volume II, the removal of Walter Shandy's wig leads his brother to be reminded of military tactics from his participation in a long past war. Such digressions take on a life of their own, like baby universes after the Big Bang with each one branching off to a possibly related clone. Sterne asks a lot of his readers to tolerate these rapid and often extended shifts in time and perspective. For those readers who are nimble enough of mind to follow, they are treated to some very comic scenes of humor that range from the broadest of satire to the most scatological of coarse jesting. By the time that Tristram makes his initial appearance, the reader has already learned to anticipate the many detours (some would call them roadblocks) of time and space that Sterne has inserted. Many of these scenes of digressive humor are so bizarre and pathetic, that the reader is not sure whether he should laugh or cry. And that perhaps is the magic that causes each new generation of readers to return and follow the twisted paths of time and space that even now can wring tears and laughs from them, sometimes in the same breath.

Although my motivation alone to read Life and Opinions speaks to its literary value (it is required reading for esteemed and illustrious Professor Priscilla "Sawcebox" Gilman's Eighteenth Century British Novels course at the prestigious and highly selective Vassar College in the scenic Hudson Valley of New York), I have discovered that it actually lives up to its assigned space in the canon. For those who are connoisseur-enough to understand that it takes patience, devotion, and a well-rounded understanding of vulgarity to get through an obra-maestra such as this, it is truly a fun read. At times I find myself daring to laugh out loud (lol) to Sterne's outlandish and fearless narrative. After such morally righteous (dull) tales as Pamela and Joseph Andrews, this novel is a welcome release. FINALLY here is an author who knows how to take charge of his readership and completely disregards their wishes while acknowledging and thriving off of their existence. Unlike the other little girly writers of his age who chew day and night on their anxiety of criticism, Sterne addresses his critics directly, super-manly, and does the most masculine thing of all: he makes fun of them. I mean, what better credit can one do for oneself other than to make a spectacle of those who think differently? In conclusion, don't attempt this one if you aren't a careful reader: it will just be words on a page, page after page, with a few anomalies stuck in. For the adventurous reader, carpe librum! However, I will offer one word of advice; watch for the pointed finger hand- therein little nuggets of truth, perfect for the mantle.

A line from the movie "adaptation" put it best: this was a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post to.

Simply put, Laurence Sterne threw out all the literary conventions of what a novel should be and how it should be arranged, a few hundred years before more recent writers like Calvino, Joyce and Danielewski did. The result is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," a gloriously rambling, richly entertaining sort-of-novel.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me." So begins Tristram, who starts his life story with his "begetting," and attempts to tell the story of his birth and life, as well as the descriptions of relatives -- his lovable uncle Toby, his eccentric dad, his patient mother (who's in labor for most of the book).

But as he tries to tell us about his life, Tristram keeps getting sidetracked by all the stories that surround him -- his uncle's romance with the Widow Wadman and the war in which he received a nasty wound in a sensitive spot, the French, the doctor who delivered him, letters in multiple languages, the parson, the personal history of the midwife, and what curses are appropriate for what occasions.

Most novels are pretty straightforward -- they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" totally ignores that, by having a beginning that lasts for the whole book, dozens of "middles," and no real end (it just stops at a suitable spot). All of this is without a real structure.

And he took this postmodern, break-all-the-rules mentality all the way, by including odd little illustrations -- when speaking of the death of Parson Yorick, Sterne includes a black page. Random empty pages. Asterisks instead of important paragraphs. And a bunch of squiggly lines to demonstrate precisely how the narratives in previous chapters looked.

At first glance, Sterne's writing style was pretty typical of his period -- detailed, somewhat formal in tone, and very talky. It takes a little while for Tristram to start dipping out of of his narrative -- at one point, he starts interrupting himself in midsentence. By the middle of the book, he's completely lost control of his own story.

And he twisted it around with lots of bawdy humor (such as poor Uncle Toby's groin injury, which causes quite a few problems), and the continuous comic stumbles of all the characters. On the subject of his own name, Tristram describes his dad's reaction: "Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which to his ears was unison to Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.")

Life is too rich to be encapsulated in a single story -- that's the problem with "Tristram Shandy," whose story is a classic comic delight of premodernist-postmodern skill.

Lawrence Sterne's sprawling "Shandy" is a fun, difficult read I enjoyed most when I took the time to digest it in 50-60 page chunks. Sterne's meandering style, with no sense of plot, and digression upon digression, can be frustrating to those looking for a story or any sense of a straight narrative.

But for those who love word play, or, like me, grew up reading Mad Magazine and other satire; or anyone with a degree in Latin or philosophy, or even if you're a frustrated writer stifled over care to the craft, "Shandy" is the book for you.

It's crazy fun -- missing pages, the infamous marbled page, black pages, drawings of pointing fingers, digression after digression on such diverse topics as armaments, noses, and fasting, and one of the most self-conscious, self-referential narrative voices in all of fiction. Literary critics point to Shandy as one of the first examples of postmodernist writing.

Sterne presages the modern tendency towards meta-fiction, that blurry limbo between fact and fiction. The controversy over "A Million Little Pieces," reality television, the movies "Adaption" and "American Splendor," along with the stream-of-consciousness style of Kerouac and the Beat Movement -- any work where the creator's ego/persona interjects into the narrative -- owes a creative debt to Tristram Shandy.

I saw the movie and decided to read the book to make sense of it all. Of course, the book was no help. Sense has no place in the "Shandean" universe. The intrepid reader should just roll with it, laugh at the absurdities and highlight in pencil the little nuggets of wisdom contained herein.