Tristram Shandy: Life & Opinions of the Gentleman

Tristram Shandy, like Don Quixote, is a classic humor novel. It contains some hilarious premises (i.e. his father being obsessed with his family's noses and Tristram's nose getting smashed by clumsy forceps work during his delivery), but the digressions, which are the central conceit of the book and can be humorous on their own, dilute the fun to the point of making it a tedious exercise to finish it. The author is clearly impressed with his own cleverness but also has a sense of humor about himself, but this cannot get the book to a level of enjoyment that reading Dickens or Thomas Hardy always achieves. The recent movie Tristram Shandy - A Cock and Bull Story hits all the highlights and is pretty amusing - I would recommend it instead. This was the first book I read on my new Kindle.

I got very tired reading this book after about 50 pagers, but I persisted for another 50 before I had had "enough". Difficult to read due to the old English style of writing...and the sentences are about half a page long. I'm 68, and at my age I like short but comprehensive sentences. Writer goes off on tangents and can't seem to stay on task (thought). It is a classic, and for readers of classic English lit, it may be a good novel. I found it tedious. Sorry!

You either love it or hate it, apparently. As for me, is there some way I can get back the hours I spent reading this awful...er, OFFAL? Let me save you who may be of like mind some trouble: Tristram DIGRESSES and DIGRESSES and DIGRESSES (mostly about trivialities) through the entire book. He addresses you, the reader, directly. He’s irreverent, a smart aleck. He plays fast and loose with narrative structure and rules (some chapters are blank, others left out). (If I were to get a very long letter like this from a friend, I’d throw it in the fireplace after about 10 minutes of getting no relevant information.) But even so, if it all added up to something meaningful or profound I'd cheer- unfortunately, for me it doesn't. Shandy's life and those of his characters are all meaningless and absurd, and not in a good way, but in a "please shoot me and put me out of my misery" kind of way (me along with the hapless characters).

BTW, I read the book after seeing Michael Winterbottom's supposedly clever filming of this novel (a film within a film), curious as to what he may have left out. Actually, he invented several scenes, ideas that weren't even in the book (e.g., reference to Ivan Pavlov and conditioning of dogs, which didn't happen until the 20th century)- disingenuous to say the least. What little interest he managed to engender, IMO had to do with elements unrelated to the book (more about the machinations of making a movie, along with sexual innuendo that he added). The main thrust of the film was the rivalry between actors, which had no correlate in the book. I went to a lot of trouble... saw a mediocre movie and read an awful book to find this out (because I'm a fan of the series The Trip, with the same stars and director, that's why).

Anyway, for me the book contained no bittersweetness, there was no pathos, there wasn’t even any ribald [English] "nudge-nudge-wink-wink", as suggested in the film. For me, no whimsy, irony, humor (not once did I laugh), no clever wordplay (little that's comprehensible in this century, anyway, ditto with the cultural references), nada. For that brand of delightful absurdity, I’d rather re-read Lewis Carroll.

I'm guessing back in the mid-1700's, in a highly religious and repressive society, it was flabbergasting to hear someone say outright that events were random, a matter of chance- why bother to strive for anything (while being mildly sexually suggestive- Ooh!!). Today, ho-hum. One thing reading this will do for you is afford you the opportunity to say casually- "By the way, have you read... Tristram Shandy? WHAT a roller coaster ride! SO post modern!" Yeah right. Maybe of interest to those who love the deconstruction of writing conventions, or to people steeped in the history of the period (though I'm a fan of Jane Austen, from about the same period, and I hated it). $2 for the Kindle version won't break the bank, but I suggest you not shell out bigger bucks for a hard copy until you've at least "had a look inside" the Kindle version and seen if it's YOUR cup of tea.

What in the hell was this lunatic yammering about for all those 650 pages? What is the deal with his obession with noses, penises, and hobby-horses, hobby-horses, hobby-horses? Why does anyone consider it amusing when a writer keeps telling you he's going to get somewhere, but never does? Why is it entertaining at all to have blank chapters? Why is that cute? Why is that interesting? Who finds this funny? Who finds anything funny here at all? Why does this book of endless, mindless prattle, blabber, and piffle tickle anyone at all? Who finds digression to be enjoyable in literature? You? Why? Why? Tell me!

I checked the ratings on Goodreads. This is what it showed:

5 stars: 33%, 4901
4 stars: 28%, 4064
3 stars: 22%, 3268
2 stars: 9%, 1414
1 star: 5%, 848

Meaning: 95% of these readers are flock-following, digression-loving, hobby-horse riding loonies who have swallowed the Kool-aid. There is nothing here but vacuous thundergunk. Pure, putrid unenertaining garbage. If I would have laughed once - just once - during the reading of this book, I would have given it a whole extra star, but it couldn't even do that. I give him one star for spelling Tristram's name right, and even then, it's a made-up name anyway, so I may have been hoodwinked as well.

A friend recommended this book, so I bought it. I agree that there are many funny passages and the writer certainly has a gift for writing. However, the story goes nowhere and I have no plan to finish it. Someone else may like it.

I thought this would be filled with anecdotes and musings about life in the "olden" days. Instead, I found it was too boring to get through. And mind you, I enjoy reading plenty of older books with rambling prose. This one, though, didn't live up to its hype, in my opinion.

It seems that a lot of reviewers have problems placing The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in its proper, or at least best fitting genre. With that confusion as precedence I will propose two places for it on library shelves. First, Tristram Shandy may be the most perfect choice for a book to bring with to pnder when upon the throne. Second it may be the first true stream of consciousness book in the English language.

If it happens that you read a few pages and then have to get back to your regularly scheduled routine, never worry about losing the thread. The entire book is a series of threads, lost found forgotten mentioned, foreshadowed lost and excavated. If you have lost the thread, read it as intended and besides it will come back later.

Every thread interconnects with some other thread as if the narrator, Mr Shandy himself, is performing the speaking version of spinning plates. The spinning plate act was a regular on the old variety shows, like Ed Sullivan. It was supposed to be about the performer’s ability to combine balance and timing but it was pretty pointless. Never the less you never knew if you wanted a plate to crash of if you enjoyed the frisson of waiting and watching and not knowing. Our narrator jumps about as things pop into his mind and we need to clutch our hat to our heads, lean in; and wait to see if anything new thought will lead to something. Most often it will not.

The dramatic tension, if such a term fits such a random story is: Will the speaker, Tristram ever get born? At the risk of a spoiler, he is telling the story and includes events later in his life. Even with that as a clue, we do not know if he will ever be delivered of his mother.

A second plot line involves his uncle, a hero of sorts. His moment of greatness took place when he was serving as an officer at a famous battle. He was wounded early in the battle and spends the rest of his life making an ever more elaborate and precise model of that battle field so that he can answer the otherwise too personal question about exactly where was he wounded.

If there are reviews that complain that Mr. Sterne needs to just focus and get on with it, they have missed the point. The point is mostly to be pointless. Originally it took me two tries and the equally clever movie, one that they said could never be made Tristram Shandy - A Cock and Bull Story for me to finish The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Its delightful sense of humor and the deliberate lack of a there, there made it a book I remember years after reading and have more than half a mind to read again.

Tristram Shandy sets down to write his life story, setting a goal of two volumes a year, but for some reason he can't stay on task, a problem he blames on his father at the time of conception. It seems that his father Walter used to remember to perform his husbandly duty with Tristram's mother by scheduling it on the same day he was to give his clock its monthly winding. However, on the night Tristram was conceived, Walter realized that he forgotten to wind the clock and sprang up to do so in the middle of the act, thus failing to provide his then-unborn son the proper humors to produce a healthy, fully developed child. As such, this coitus interruptus has spawned in Tristram a young man with the inability to stay focused, which is why he doesn't even get to his birth until volume III.

I was assigned this 18th Century novel in graduate school and sort of fell in love with it. It takes a bit of focus, not only for the elevated language but the constant meandering of the narrative, which can be downright aggravating at times. Once you give in to the novel's structure, however, you may find it as delightful and amusing as I did.

I think I've always been most fascinated by Volume VII, in which Tristram temporarily abandons his rambling writing style and confronts his mortality. Fearing that Death is at his door, he sneaks out of his home via the back way and embarks on a tour of Europe, providing the reader with a rich travelogue of the continent's beautiful cities. In Montreiul, he waxes poetic about Janatone, the inn-keeper's daughter, stating that many of the wonders of the city will be there for centuries for the reader to see, but Janatone in all her beauty will one day be gone. This reflection on mortality is short-lived, however, and by Volume VIII Tristram is back to his old tricks, trying to pound out an autobiography but forever being distracted by anecdotes of his raucous Uncle Toby.

This book is not for everyone. As great English novels of this era go, there are easier reads (I find Henry Fielding a bit more accessible that Sterne), but if you're up to the challenge, you may find it a rewarding experience.

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.

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

This is a difficult book for the modern novel reader to engage with. It seems from the the store reviews I’ve read that ‘customers’ either like it or hate it. I can understand both positions, having half a century ago given up on the book in a futile attempt ‘to get through it’, as we say. Since when I’ve read it twice more, each time with increasing delight. Samuel Johnson maintained that if you were to read Richardson’s Clarissa for the story you’d hang yourself’; on Sterne’s novelistic adventure, he maintains that ‘nothing odd will do long.’

About lasting one has to wait and see. Sterne’s novel has lasted, in-so-far-as any novel written in the Eighteenth Century is still read in the Twenty-first. For anyone studying the English Novel, Sterne is a must, as is Joyce, and, I would argue, Bunyan. Popular in its day Tristram Shandy is now essential reading for perspectives on the novel - for its innovations in language, structure and humanity, by which I mean sympathetic tolerance of human sentiment and eccentricity. The book demands patience and much re-reading to yield up its treasures, but I fear that fewer and fewer of us today have the time or patience needed.

The book begins and ends not with the life of the eponymous Tristram but with a joke about begetting the hero, except for the fact that details of how he was born are almost nil, while the book ends with the erotic failure of a bull. The book is about the struggle to tell anything, let alone a story. Like Byron in Don Juan, Tristram confides in and plays games with his reader. He is the ultimate ‘intrusive narrator,’ asking the reader serious and unansweable questions about God and the business of creation, and admitting the fact that in 600+ pages he can say nothing about either. Words often fail him: he offers in their place rows of stars, blank pages, marbled pages, and wiggly lines, and even omitted pages.

So this is not the kind of novel in which the reader can relax and lose himself in the story. It is a comic novel, but while not exactly a belly full of laughs, it’s a serious and witty comedy of implication rather than a comedy of manners.

This is a historically significant book, and my rating of 3-stars is based on my own reaction to it as a modern reader. I found it mildly entertaining. Some of the humor is undoubtedly lost on a modern reader, but there are many incidents that are amusing in a slapstick sort of way. It also addresses political, philosophical, and theological issues with snarky sarcasm.

Part of the conceit of the book is that it is a faux autobiography which goes on for hundreds of pages just building up to the birth of Tristram Shandy. The author can't help himself from going off on so many tangents that his life story only dribbles out among the many asides. Still, it's a classic in English literature and should be read by those who want to claim the distinction of being "literate".
Monsters of the Midway 1969: Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll, Viet Nam, Civil Rights, and Football

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy' is a fictional memoir of sorts, but the novel is written in a manner to subvert the formal conventions of the novel (a proto-post-modern genre), and along the way, assert the role of the author as a Maximus Prime Writer, or in other words, someone in complete control of your television set. It is all in good fun, a wonderful satire that aims for lowbrow comedy by using every single aspect of the highbrow educated culture of 1760. To mention some examples of the author's games with the reader, the Dedication is placed after several chapters of the book, chapters are skipped or missing, the narration of the action is interrupted by sudden 'ejaculations' of listening characters or the author who are reminded of another story, which may or may not be finished in the telling, while the original plot thread may be mislaid for awhile.

If you are looking for any forward motion in the plot, forget it. Sterne fills his novel cover to cover with literary/philosophical/Christian/ancient Greek/ French intellectual essay and Art references that are twisted into puns, jokes, wordplay and wayward opinions and speeches, but especially digressions. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of digressions. Not only does the conversation and remembrances during the night of Tristram's birth take up 40% of the book before he is born and named, but one of the nine 'books' (sections) is a lively inserted travelogue of the author's trip to Paris.

There is mention early in the book of an amusing mysterious injury that a central character suffered and that Tristram promises to explain, which he does in a chaotic collage of revisited scenes involving an anxious romance - a mystery which possibly might be the one reason that some readers finish the book in spite of its archaic language and frustrating construction.

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.

Having been assigned this 18th-century bestseller back in college and unable to finish it, I thought I'd pick it up again and give it another shot. Alas, I made it to Volume 7 before I skimmed to the ending.

This novel is truly inventive. It's hard to imagine how audiences received, for example, Sterne's black, blank, and marble pages! I laughed at some of the episodes and the miscommunications. The author also made me think about the way in which stories are told. For example, how do you explain Tristram's accidental circumcision by the window when you need to know how the window weights went missing in the first place? That, in turn, requires you to understand who Uncle Toby is and the origin of his "hobby-horse." Sterne creates a world through his digressions and it's all quite clever the way in which he weaves these strands.

I also enjoyed Uncle Toby's relationship with his brother, Tristam's father. Sterne has an obvious affection for his characters, who have affection for each other despite their differences.

The biggest problem for me was Sterne's archaic use of language, or perhaps his style. It took me several attempts to understand pages and paragraphs, and, often, I was still confused. Audiences in the 18th century were familiar with all the references, but many of them were lost on me.

This is certainly a memorable work with memorable characters, but the overall payoff just didn't justify the effort involved.

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.

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.

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.

This work is OLD but reads like the most innovative avant-garde novel of today. The book is about Tristram Shandy and his birth, his uncle and his war wound and his father with his love of names and noses. Seriously! This is the original story-with-no-story and the beauty of the book is in the way that it's written. In reality, Sterne talks about anything and everything. He makes digressions lasting 20 odd pages, rambles to the reader, apologises for rambling, then discusses how he plans to get the story finally under way.
The book is out of order chronologically. One of the funniest things about the book is that it's meant to be an autobiography of the fictional Tristram. Half the book is spent telling the story of the day of his birth. Then, the author moves to another scene, mainly revolving around Tristram's uncle Toby and the novel finishes several years before Tristram's birth.
Sterne's writing is chaotic resembling a stream of consciousness. Sentences run onto the other, there's heaps of dashes and asterisks being used for various purposes. Sterne adds scribbles to signify the mood of the character. When one character dies, to symbolise his end, Sterne has a black page to describe it. When introducing a beautiful female character, Sterne says he can't be bothered describing her so he leaves a blank page for the reader to draw his/her own rendition.
The book - though technically not a satire - in the process of going nowhere and saying nothing makes fun of many religious, political and societal topics. Sterne was a minister but from the book it can be gleaned that he was a particularly irreverent one.
The work is divided into 9 books, published serially. This is a work where you can just pick up a chapter and read it. Some are several pages. Others are two lines. It takes a while to get used to Sterne's writing "style" so read slowly. This goes for the whole novel as there's so much hidden underneath the surface.
This edition is great in having footnotes on the same page and reviews of Tristram as well as critical essays and Sterne's own letters about the work - many of which are very good.
Tristram is funny, ridiculous, clever and very very eccentric. An absolute MUST!

I first picked up Tristram Shandy when I was about 16. I knew nothing about it except that it was a Classic and therefore probably very boring. I was a big Kathy Acker fan at the time (still am, 14 years later) and liked the way she littered her books with strange pictures and diagrams. Imagine my shock on finding that Sterne had been doing the same stuff in the 1760s.
Tristram Shandy is one of the earliest so-called novels in the English language, but it's probably the most astoundingly innovative work of fiction ever written. When a character dies, there's a black page. When Sterne wants to demonstrate the randomness of life, there's a marbled page (marbling being a random process in the original edition - the point is now lost in mass-market paperbacks). When a character makes a gesture with his stick, there's an extravagant scribble. I had assumed, in my Teen Ignorance, that your typical Penguin Classic was a sturdy but boring narrative about supposedly real people doing this and that at interminable length. The brilliance of Tristram Shandy is that Sterne displays totally credible (if utterly daft) characters in a proto-Dickensian manner, while at the same time asserting the material character of the book in your hand.
I couldn't get academic about this book even if I wanted to. It's the most completely mad novel I've ever read. It's infuriating, yes, because Sterne is so good at the two things he's doing: telling a good story with living characters, and reminding you in his smirking whisper that it's only a story and that you're reading it in a book.
This edition is as up-to-date as they get, and besides having comprehensive and very useful notes (Sterne is big into the tradition of Learned Wit, and many of his allusions can be a tad obscure without a modern scholar explaining them) it includes the excellent introductory essay by Christopher Ricks, carried over from the earlier (1967) Penguin edition. The UK price is three quid; it seems almost indecent that such a stunning performance can be had for so little.
Dr Johnson famously remarked (in 1776) "Nothing odd will do long. 'Tristram Shandy' did not last." Almost a quarter of a millennium later, it's still there, tongue thrust firmly into cheek. It's worth the whole of Fielding, Smollett and Richardson put together, in my opinion.

Tristram Shandy begins to tell his story literally ad ovo... his unfortunate life begins its down turn at the very moment of conception when his mother turns away his father's attention by remembering the clock. Lawrence Sterne accomplishes one of the most humorous and yet innovative and unbelievably complex novels in history. While the reader waits for Tristram to come to the world, the characters are introduced through the most delicious and sophisticated game with ideas, opinions and ambiguous expresions, which connect, for example, uncle Toby's hobby horses with sexual behavours and problems of miscomunication. Misunderstandings reveal the unaccurate nature of language in a time when the illustration worked hard on capitalizing all human knowledge through the enciclopedia. A clever parody of the ideas of its time is what Sterne delivers with humour and resourcefullness. I find this book to be even stranger than James Joyce's "Ulysses", mainly because of its use of the page, in which he inserts lines representing the evolution of his tale, black spots, or he leaves a blank page so the reader can draw there. It is a truely memorable work of art, which everyone should read in order to put in perspective the literary works of the XXth century which are proclamed to be the most original pieces in history.

Sterne does indeed convey the limitations of fiction splendidly in this book. Tristram Shandy and the other characters here -- especially Tristram's uncle -- are also portrayed particularly well, since one gets to know them in the same way that one gets to know one's friends, that is, through haphazard, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes incomplete, stories about them that are not told in chronological order.
In spite of these refreshing features, however, this book can be frustrating by the time one has reached the point of Tristram's birth, because, by this point, the magic has worn off. Sterne continues to play with the same narrative techniques he has displayed from the beginning of the book, But by now, one has grown weary of them and needs some tension to convince one to continue reading. If you've already got all of the meta-punchlines, so to speak, the rest of the book just seems like more of the same. Although I would strongly recommend this book, I have to confess that I left it halfway and would probably expect most readers who are amused by the book at the beginning to do the same once they have finished a few hundred pages.

This novel has the length of a Victorian work but both its vocabulary and subject matter are not at all puritan. Themes discussed include for instance intra-uterine baptism and accidental circumcision!

The running joke is that the reporter constantly digresses from his digressions and seems incapable of ever getting to his point. In this pseudo-autobiographical work, the narrator's birth finally happens only a good fourth into the book! Presumably, the intent is to be comical but the result is rather silly and even tedious to a modern reader.

Published in nine volumes in the 1760's, the novel definitely appears unstructured. It ends without any true conclusion and one feels that many more volumes could have been written and published. Anyhow, there is no plot as such and, despite the title, little is actually learned about Tristram Shandy and his life. The main characters are really his father, a superficial man with very set preconceived notions on a whole series of subjects, and his rather pathetic and anti-social uncle, marked by his war injury _ in the groin!

The author succeeds in being very original in a variety of ways: by very frequently addressing the reader, by limiting some chapters to a single sentence and even including blank ones, by making very long quotations in French and Latin or long pointless lists such as the number of streets in each of the various Paris neighbourhoods, etc.

Overall, this book can only be recommended to those interested in the history of the British novel with a marked curiosity for atypical 18th century works.

This is the only pocket edition of Tristram Shandy to get. The Introduction by Christopher Ricks may be the best introduction to any novel I have ever seen. There is also a fine preface by Melvyn New which brings up a good list of issues for the person researching TS. It has the best text of TS, the Florida edition. TS was published in four installments (nine volumes) and just throwing together various texts out of copyright, like the oxford edition, is not optimum (lots of printers' errors). On the downside, if you are thumbing through TS for a thesis like I am, this books' binding will fall apart. Alas, poor reader!

What an amazingly funny book. This is why classics are classics ~ they endure because they are worth preserving. This novel about the process of writing a novel, or rather an autobiography, is utterly fresh andclever today, more so, even, than when it was first written. The fact that the title is entirely meaningless, the protagonist barely appears in the book, the plot is meandering to the point of nonexistence ~ all these add to one's enoyment of this monumental exploration of what can and cannot meaningfully be put between covers. Without doubt i shall return to this book in years to come ~ if i am granted them on this earth ~ and find more enjoyment and amusement in it. Hard to believe this classic could be out of print in the USA.

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.

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.

Composed long before there were rules about what a novel is supposed to look like, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" is a visionary piece of literature, a book so original in construction it almost defies genre. Conceived by an Anglican vicar who, under the comic influence of Rabelais and Swift and equally informed by Cervantes and Shakespeare, turned to writing fiction later in his life, it is an inadvertent masterpiece, the product of a writer who just wanted to have fun and entertain his readers and ultimately entertained generations.
The book is not a fictitious autobiography, although its narrator Tristram Shandy might have intended it to be; most of the story is concerned not with his life but with his idiosyncratic family and the circumstances surrounding his conception and birth, with many digressions on various related and unrelated subjects. His father Walter, whose conjugal duties coincide with his having to wind the clock the first Sunday of every month, compiles a compendium of information he calls the Tristrapoedia for the education of his newborn son. His uncle Toby, an expert in military architecture, rides a hobby-horse and occupies his time with the science of besieging fortresses. Other characters include Corporal Trim, a former soldier and now Toby's valet and factotum; Dr. Slop, a dwarfish physician who delivers the baby Tristram; and Yorick the parson, who naturally is descended from the infamous jester of the Danish royal court.
There are two aspects to this book that distinguish Sterne's style. The first is that he provides several different channels of narration and never really settles on a main plot thread; he interrupts the flow of one narrative with another, delivering narrative flights of fancy like a marriage contract, a sermon, a notice of excommunication from the Catholic Church, a travelogue for France and Italy, and amusing anecdotes about extracurricular characters. In this way he presages the modernism of many twentieth century authors.
The second is that he does not restrict his text to English words; he intersperses Greek, Latin, and French passages where he likes, and on occasion he does not even use words at all, but symbols and glyphs to express certain concepts. A cross appears in the print when a character crosses himself; a character's death is memorialized by a black page; a blank page is provided for the reader to draw (mentally or physically) his own vision of the voluptuous Widow Wadman, who has a romantic eye for Toby; long rows of asterisks and dashes are used for things that are better left unsaid. At one point Sterne even draws squiggly lines to illustrate the sinuosity of his narrative, celebrating his own whimsy.
"Tristram Shandy" was published in nine volumes over the last nine years of Sterne's life, and whether these were all he had intended is debatable because the narrative is implied to have neither a beginning nor an end; it seems very much like a work in progress. As such, by modern literary standards it may not be considered a novel, but in the sense of its unconventionality, its supply of so many bemusing surprises for the reader to discover, it is as literal an example of the term "novel" as there is.

Due to all the previous reviews, we know the plot and themes of this work: Shandy tells us his story while beating around the bush. He tells us about his uncle and other stories that he thinks are necessary to explain his own life -the joke is that he really doesn't tell us much about himself and what we do get to know is spread out over the entire book. He sees himself as unfortunate due to some events caused by circumstances not of his control -his nose is flattened, he is accidentally circumcised, he was named Tristam by accident and so on.

I get this was written a long time ago and was a book pioneering the concept of a novel and it was supposed to be a comedy. BUT, I found it too difficult to read due to all the scattered plot elements and interjected stories that really had nothing to do with what I was trying to find out - Tristam's real own story. That's what was supposed to be funny - Tristam putting off his own life story. But, it irritated me more than anything to have to wait and wait and ride out the convoluted episodes.

I like reading classics. The title of the book intrigued me. Others had given it great reviews, so I wanted to give it a shot. But, this was just not my thing at all. The writing style it was written in was too difficult for me to stick with. I don't want to give it less than three stars because I recognize this has merit and is a classic of sorts. But, it did not make it a fun read for me. I am taking the advice of others and will watch the movie version - and will also read the History of Tom Jones to see if I find it to be more enlightening.

With Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne reaches the endpoint -of what novels can do, and then goes beyond, and he does this more than a century before Joyce, Kafka, and Musil. Pure fun to read, it is a book that can might change your view of literature, as it has mine.

Due to all the previous reviews, we know the plot and themes of this work: Shandy tells us his story while beating around the bush. He tells us about his uncle and other stories that he thinks are necessary to explain his own life -the joke is that he really doesn't tell us much about himself and what we do get to know is spread out over the entire book. He sees himself as unfortunate due to some events caused by circumstances not of his control -his nose is flattened, he is accidentally circumcised, he was named Tristam by accident and so on.

I get this was written a long time ago and was a book pioneering the concept of a novel and it was supposed to be a comedy. BUT, I found it too difficult to read due to all the scattered plot elements and interjected stories that really had nothing to do with what I was trying to find out - Tristam's real own story. That's what was supposed to be funny - Tristam putting off his own life story. But, it irritated me more than anything to have to wait and wait and ride out the convoluted episodes.

I like reading classics. The title of the book intrigued me. Others had given it great reviews, so I wanted to give it a shot. But, this was just not my thing at all. The writing style it was written in was too difficult for me to stick with. I don't want to give it less than three stars because I recognize this has merit and is a classic of sorts. But, it did not make it a fun read for me. I am taking the advice of others and will watch the movie version - and will also read the History of Tom Jones to see if I find it to be more enlightening.

With Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne reaches the endpoint -of what novels can do, and then goes beyond, and he does this more than a century before Joyce, Kafka, and Musil. Pure fun to read, it is a book that can might change your view of literature, as it has mine.

Had this review been a farce, which, unless everyone's opinions and impressions are to be looked upon as a farce as well as mine, I see no reason to suppose - this paragraph, Sir or Madam, has finished the first act of it, and then the second must be set off thus.
Flip--flap--cra.a..a...a.ack--flip--flap--'tis a well bound book.--Do you know whether the book in my palm is good or no?--flip--flap--crack--I break the spine at each turn (much like my own). I must warn you, though, between the last 'flap' and 'crack', when you thought you had me all to yourself, I was in fact sipping warmed cointreau and thinking about noses for a full five minutes straight. It is quite good of me to tell you (don't you think), otherwise I may have fooled you completely into not seeing reality.
--Your worships and your revereneces love literature--and God has made you all with good eyes and minds; I suggest that you all join me in a good read.
Let me read on --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Zounds! that was a good bit, wasn't it?
O! there are - which I could sit whole days with - books that expand one's ideas of the construction of reality, but give one a laugh and some good dirty jokes. The ideas and opinons of Tristram Shandy (here reborn into a review) form just such a book.

"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.

As an undergraduate English major, I was recently dragged through this book kicking and screaming. "There's nothing happening!" I kept arguing in vain. How wrong I was. Fortunately, my Professor saw the value in making me continue. This book continues the work that Shakespeare began in the English language and that Joyce would later undertake. All explore the human condition excellently, but none do it in as funny a way as Sterne. Within marbled and black pages, instructions to re-read chapters and descriptions of courtships as battles, we see not only Sterne going through the growing pains of being a novelist, but the novel itslef going through its own growing pains. Sterne helped to define the genre and created a scathing farce in the process.

Tristram Shandy is a rumbustious, experimental novel by Laurence Sterne, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. The story is narrated, with lengthy digressions by the title character who in the process pokes fun at the plotting, structure and even typography of the novel form - still very new at the time. Tristram Shandy has been seen as the precurser of stream of consciousness writing and a true masterpiece.

Dr. Johnson (he of the first dictionary) famously said about this book, An odd thing will not last. Little did he know. Dr. Johnson is no longer much read (though he is mentioned), but Sterne's odd masterpiece is read and chuckled over three hundred years after being written.
Which just shows that the only definition of Art is: That which lasts. If it lasted, it is Art. If it didn't, then it isn't. (Or wasn't.) Opinions of individuals do not count, only those of Humanity as a whole, which votes with its Collective Attention over dozens, or preferably hundreds of years. Think about it the next time someone flatulates about the latest painter or writer of genius. Tell him to wait a hundred years before he can be sure.

Great fun and a delightful ride. An original full of word play and some structures that might be difficult for modern readers and rewarding if one takes the time discover the allusions and references.

... works of fiction in the English language. I got to it through "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" by the great Brazilian author Machado de Assis, who modeled the novel after TS. He he can be listed along with the other A-list writers like Beckett and Joyce, who were influenced by Lawrence Stern. T.S. is not an easy read because it's nonlinear and the language style isn't what we're used to. But given that, the use of language is brilliant, the characters are endearing, the philosophy subtle and profound and worked into the fabric of the structure. It's also laugh out loud funny. To the guy who gave the chapter by chapter critique: even assuming you are correct, remember that art doesn't have to be perfect to be great. And to the other, one star guy: stick to Clive Cussler. You'll be happier.

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.