Tristram Shandy (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

Rating:
Summary: Good book, but Beware AUDIBLE.COM version -
Review: Amazon.com offers customers Audible.com audio book selections - but beware - they are often abridged without (ever) being labeled as such. Audible offers many abridged books which, by the universal omission of the honest and legal "ABRIDGED" denotation, are misrepresented as complete.

Do not under any circumstances order the Audible version of Tristram Shandy. The narrator is wonderful, but entire chapters are missing, making the piece completely nonsensical. One example of missing information is a pivotal marriage proposal by Uncle Toby, and the title character's exploits have been all but completely excised! Unconscionable.

It's not Amazon.com's fault, however, if they are unaware of Audible's odd practice. I have informed them of this and one hopes they will take timely action.

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary tale of an 18th Century family
Review: Have you wanted to read a book where the author decides to "rip out" one of the chapters, or leaves a blank page for you to 'draw' one of the characters? Would you enjoy a story which takes many chapters before the hero manages to be born? This 18th-Century tale is touchingly told. The characters are real, and fascinating. It's not their fault that their story is frequently and impishly interrupted by outlandish "digressions" on the part of an author so creative that his modern descendants are considered to be Joyce and Beckett, as well as many others. Would you enjoy a chapter on Chapters? About buttonholes? About whether parents and their children are kin to each other? A chapter on curses? Poor Laurence Sterne has so much trouble getting two of his characters down the stairs that he finally calls in a "critic" to help! Advice on reading such an unusual, even unique, book: read the first several chapters, then stop and reread them. Continue that process and soon the book will feel quite familiar, and that's when the fun really starts. The Oxford World's Classics edition follows the first edition of the book, and is preferred. Amazon also offers the fully-annotated edition, the "Florida" edition, in three volumes.

Rating:
Summary: Note About the Oxford World Classics Edition
Review: I just wanted to note that pages 29 and 30 of this edition are supposed to be black, not blank. Whether this was a simple mistake by the publisher or just a way to save money-two black pages must take alot of ink-doing so alters the possible interpretation of Sterne's work. Given the fact that Sterne closely watched the original publishers to prevent deviations from his intent, I expect that Sterne would be appalled that the black pages were not included.

Otherwise, I have no negative comments about the work. While many complain that the narrator jumps around to much and it is difficult to understand, that is part of the fun of reading the book. The narrator essentially makes the reader a character in the book-ground breaking methods which are way before his time. Excellent

Rating:
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."

Rating:
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.

Rating:
Summary: quaint, post-modern, hilarious, insightful all at once
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.

Rating:
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?).

Rating:
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.

Rating:
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!

Rating:
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.