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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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Summary: disregard first review please
Review: this review is actually of the first review, which apparently is about another (comic) book, and is misapplied to this novel. I love Laurence Sterne's novel, and I recommend it to everyone.
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Summary: Only For Students of Stream of Consciousness
Review: This was the 4th book I had to read for History of the Novel. It was so bad (in my opinion) it nearly drove me crazy! This novel lacks ANY orginization or memorable features. (Thank goodness the teacher did not ask us to do a paper on it!) I understand that the author was introducing a new technique (stream of consciousness). But if you want to read a good example of stream of consciousness you should move towards Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Also Margaret Laurence's "The Stone Angel." The only good thing I can possibly say about "Tristram Shandy" is that it may be a golden turkey. (That is a novel that is SO BAD it actually takes on a charm of its own.)
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Summary: An 18th century modern novel
Review: 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!
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Summary: Amazingly innovative, clever, and defiant
Review: Tristram Shandy has a cult following -- although few people have actually read it, most of us have read something directly influenced by it. Sterne was a creative genius, and pulled no punches when telling the story of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Not only is this a shaggy-dog story, and a prototype for "experimental" writers like James Joyce and William Burroughs, but it is also a (remarkably early) meditation on the self-referentiality of literature, and the fine (nonexistent?) separation between a book's abstract textual form and its physical, material, paper-and-ink form. Like a good postmodernist, Sterne realizes you can't very well separate the two. You didn't like this book? Well maybe Sterne didn't want you to like it. Maybe likeability should not be the primary project of a text. One of the meta-statements Sterne seems to be making is he has no respect for your time, nor your desire for narrative cohesion -- and why should he? Defiant, Sterne is. Very defiant. Cool.
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Summary: A great edition by the leading Sterne scholar
Review: Tristram Shandy has deeply influenced modern writers like Kundera, DeLillo and Pynchon. This edition, by the leading Sterne scholar, should further enchance Sterne's reputation and influence on modern letters
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Summary: A Worthwhile Read
Review: 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.
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Summary: A serious masterpiece
Review: Tristram Shandy is all too often dismissed as rambling or merely eccentric--and many of the reviews posted here thus far prove no exception. First, let me address some common objections to the novel. Q: It's not about anything. A: That's because it's about everything: body and sensorium, knotting and mapping, blankness and plenum, apocryphal origins, the dangers of solipsism, a crisis in historical continuity. It's also about noses, petticoats, breeches, love, wounds, and auxiliary verbs. Perhaps above all it is a novel about pain--where language fails. Q: It's too long and erratic. A: Be patient. The prose takes some getting used to, but past the first 50 pages or so the reading experience can become incredibly addictive, offering many immediate pleasures. The narrator's digressions, staccatos, elisions are of the essence; he is grappling honestly with problems of narration and temporality. Q: It's incomprehensible without historical background. A: Actually, what amazed me about the book was how timeless its interests and insights are. It's entirely possible to read through without any footnotes and still get everything out of it Sterne had intended to put in. That being said, I'd also like to note for the record that this book is not simply some forerunner to "postmodernism." Yes--it's clearly the ideal 18th-century example for talking about hypertext, reflexivity, bricolage, metonymic slippage, etc., but to take the text as a merely textual experiment is certainly not the most interesting way to read it. Sterne is not reveling in play so much as he deeply understands the affinity between the tragic and the absurd. I sincerely encourage everyone to try this novel. It's really one of the most original and poignant fictions I have ever read--right up there with Shakespeare, George Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, and Nabokov.
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Summary: Tristram Shandy: Honours in Anaesthetising
Review: Tristram Shandy... hmmm? Where to begin? Yorick? His conception? His nose? If it sounds banal to you, try reading it. It took me six weeks to get through the couple of hundred pages. This book is ridiculous, and I mean that as in "stupid", not "devilishly funny". Try Catcher in the Rye or Pride and Prejudice instead.
Rating: 
Summary: It takes some work
Review: While I had to force myself to finish it, placed in the context of 18th Century literature, this book has some surprisingly witty moments. Sterne is extremely self concious of himself as a writer, there are moments when he is speaking to the narrator that are both funny and confusing (it's hard to tell when he's speaking to the narrator). I would reccomend this book for those readers who are looking for a challenge and who know a LOT about 18th C. novels. Otherwise, you'll probably be bored and perplexed. It's a love it or hate it kind of book and there's a good reason why most literary scholars won't go near it. It was extremely popular when it was published, but as far I as know, only the connoisseurs like it now.
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