Tristram Shandy

Rating:
Summary: The Birth of Postmodernism
Review: With "Tristram Shandy," Sterne invented postmodernism 200 years before it supposedly was initiated by the likes Joyce, Burroughs and Pynchon. The book is hilarious. It is supposed to be the life and opinions of the narrator. Instead, it takes about fourhundred pages to even get to when he was born. The book radically changes tone in the last hundred pages (as, I think, Sterne was nearing death), and the then present day Shandy is finally presented. Some of these scenes are touching, but the final chapters become redundant. The book is completely inconsistent, the narrator interrupts at all possible times ... But it works! Read this book, but be advised to possibly skim the last fifty pages.