The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Germinal comic masterpiece
Review: There is so much in this novel one hardly knows where to begin, which is Sterne's hilarious problem for the first 300 pages or so. Tristram Shandy is a comic masterpiece, like Fielding's Tom Jones, which arose barely after the invention of the genre. Even Sterne's name almost seems a play on words and it's easy to see why great minds who followed Sterne like Nietzsche (Note "The Ass Festival" in Zarathustra), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), James Joyce (Ulysses) and J.P. Donleavy (Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, The Singular Man, Balthazar B., The Ginger Man, Saddest Summer of Samuel S.) admired immensely and were influenced by him. One has to love the way that Toby explains to Mrs. Wadman where he was wounded during one of her sieges of his fortress. One has to laugh at Sterne's tearing out of chapters, allowing the reader to pencil in his favorite profanities, making sense of pages of black ink, marbled patterns, blank pages and squiggled lines marking little ups and downs -- as obscure as the raw meaning of life itself. He writes chapters about whiskers, noses, buttons and nothing. I especially enjoyed the dedications to famous persons before several of his volumes. The epigrams were delicious and the careful reader is rewarded on every page for paying close attention to Sterne's often subtle comic style. Sterne certainly opened up the genre with an experimental literary style in which he created a vibrant, raucous, hilarious novel still relevant 300 years after it was penned. I can't say enough about the contribution of this comic gem to the literary works that followed, especially in Ireland. If you're a serious reader with a sense of humor, you'll be amused and enlightened by Sterne's intrepid wit.

Rating:
Summary: Essential
Review: This is a wonderful book and any humanist who doesn't mind 18th-century English should read it. I feel a love and affection for Uncle Toby, and certain other characters from here, beyond anything I can muster for characters from any other book. And Sterne is funny! Expect bawdy humor and anarchistic fun with narrative structure. Sterne will teach you to read.

Rating:
Summary: Ad ovo
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Over-rated
Review: Tristram Shandy is a self-indulgent, pretentious mess. Laurence Sterne seems more concerned with his erudition than with telling his story. The novel is a sort of intellectual tease, as Sterne intorduces storylines, and then announces that he will complete the storyline later so that he can digress onto some topic that may have been of interest in 1760 (such as the description of fortifications) but which is of little interest today. By doing this, Sterne builds up and then frustrates our expectations, revealing Sterne as both vain in his self-indulgence and disrespectful to his gentle readers. One would need to be a classicist to understand the classical references littered throughout the book. Sterne could have told a story; instead he gave a lecture.