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Summary: The definitive '90s life journey - sex, birth, love and war
Review: I loved the book - the plot twists and turns but never failed to grip me. The writing was fresh throughout, from the closely observed bedroom scene which introduces three of the main protagonists to the closing animal episode [which frankly could have been left out]. Highly recommended.
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Summary: You wouldn't want to share a carriage with this fellow
Review: I started this book because I love the quote about writing being but a different word for conversation. Yes, there are moments of great wit. However, they are lost within a mass of verbiage so dense that it makes your mortgage agreement look like a Little Golden Book. It's not the sublime non-linearity of Joyce's writing or Ornette Coleman's playing. It's the amplification of the self to an unbearable degree. Certainly a unique achievement, I guess. But so is Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music."
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Summary: You wouldn't want to share a carriage with this fellow
Review: I started this book because I love the quote about writing being but a different word for conversation. Yes, there are moments of great wit. However, they are lost within a mass of verbiage so dense that it makes your mortgage agreement look like a Little Golden Book. It's not the sublime non-linearity of Joyce's writing or Ornette Coleman's playing. It's the amplification of the self to an unbearable degree. Certainly a unique achievement, I guess. But so is Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music."
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Summary: quaint, post-modern, hilarious, insightful all at once
Review: I'd never heard of this book until I saw it featured in the ultra-trendy 'Wallpaper' magazine. A model was reading it and she had a really curious look on her face. I'm so glad I found out about this book. I really advise you to ignore the negative reviews about it being "self-consciously frustrating", pointless, etc. because it really isn't. If they simply didn't like it because they thought it was poorly written, that would be understandable, but it really sounds like they didn't get it and that they weren't open to the great pleasures of this book, which is pretty pathetic for English professors and students. It really isn't that hard to understand. I've only read a few of the classics before this, and the version I was reading had no editor's notes or explanations, but I had no problem understanding this book after reading the first ten chapters and getting used to it. I found it to be much more accessible then anything I've read by Shakespeare, anyway. I read somewhere a comparison to a Seinfeld in that it's "about nothing", but in a really humorous way. The book does have some jarringly post-modern elements, surprising for a novel from the 1700's (literally one of the first few novels ever written). In this it is unique because it is probably one of the only works of literature that can be thought of in modern times as both quaint and post-modern at the same time. But understanding this is not necessary to get involved in this book. It really is like an eighteenth century sitcom. There are mad digressions, stories within stories are started, delayed, started, delayed then forgotten about. There are quite a few genuinely funny moments where I laughed out loud as well as keen insights into human behaviour and the human condition, sometimes light and amusing and others melancholy. It was a really addictive read, simply because it was so entertaining and enjoyable...
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Summary: Unexpectedly Funny!
Review: I'm a college student and chose this book to read for a British Lit project. I was not expecting much and the book seemed to start off slow, but it takes a little while to get used to Sterne's writing style. Some parts of the book are hard to get through (like a long, seemingly pointless chapter about a tour of France) but you will be rewarded with the many funny scenes and dead-on observations on life. And I love Sterne's "visual aids." Uncle Toby, Trim, and Walter are, to me, unforgettable characters. An odd novel, but surprisingly funny.
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Summary: Universities are killing literature
Review: I'm so glad I didn't do English Lit at college. I've just read the customer reviews of this wonderful book and seen how being forced to read something you wouldn't normally read makes you bitter, twisted and intent on ensuring no-one else gets pleasure out of it. It also makes you cemented in your opinion that if you don't like it, it must have no redeeming feature (after, all "I did a degree in Eng Lit, so I must know what I'm talking about"). All great difficult books suffer from this -- Ulysses, At Swim-Two-Birds, Lanark, The Trial, and that's just the 20th century. Oh well. People should read what they want, when they want: they should also accept that there is little out there with no value, it's taste that causes us to like different things.That said, what do I think of it? I think it's one of the most fun reads there is, once you get yourself back into an 18thC mode of reading (MTV has so much to answer for with our attention spans). Also, forget all this bunk about it being postmodern or deliberately experimenting with the novel. When this was written, there WAS no novel, that came in the 19thC. Before this there was Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and little else that could be called a novel. All Sterne was doing was writing to entertain, and that he does marvelously. He had no boundaries to push - they weren't there - so he made his own (and they just happened to be a long way away from where he originally sat). Anyway -- if you like the idea of a book that coined the phrase "cock and bull story", includes blank pages to show discretion when two characters make love, that draws wiggling lines indicating the authors impression of the amount of digression in the previous pages, you'll love it. But just stop if you don't like it, instead of perseveering and then taking it out on everyone.
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Summary: The Florida edition makes all the difference!!!
Review: Move over, Kristeva! The definitive version, makes all the others obsolete! The New (Florida) edition is a critical advance in scholarship, and moves traditional literary criticism back to its place at the forefront.
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Summary: An overlong amusement
Review: 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.
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Summary: Much more than a mere plot
Review: This book was such a pleasure to read with the most endearing characters ever. People on the subway must have thought I was strange when I was snickering to myself over this book. I just fell in love with Trim! Don't read this with the idea that everything will make perfect sense, let it take control of you and you will fall in love with the nonsensical writing in about 50 pages or so. As I was reading along, I just couldn't wait for Shandy to change the subject again, make more phallic references or tell another funny story.
I docked one star off because starting in volume seven some of the chapters really get off track (to the point where I didn't know what he was talking about at all) as if Sterne wasn't sure where he wanted to take the book at that point and the reader has to read his thoughts as he tries to sort it out. It soon gets back on track again and moves along nicely until the end (or was it?).
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Summary: Funny and profound
Review: This is one of my favorites. It's not a book to rush through so that you can check it off on your lifetime reading plan. It's a profoundly human and wonderfully funny tale that needs to be savored. It was originally published in nine small volumes over a period of six years or so and no one at that time thought they had to sit down and read all nine volumes at once. This is a book you need to spend time with, pick up when it suits you or when you need to be refreshed and let one of the great writers in the language chat you up for awhile about the lovable Shandy family. Ignore the nonsense on the back of the Penguin edition about it being a novel about novel writing. This is a book about life. Two of its characters, Walter and Toby Shandy, rank with the best of Shakespeare, Fielding and Dickens. There are some truly great belly laughs, some really thoughtful philosophy and even a tear or two. Sterne's hobby horse theory is an extremely acute behavioral insight. If you give it a chance, you'll end up being very grateful to Laurence Sterne for adding such a beautiful piece to the literature of English speaking people.
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