Tristram Shandy: An Authoritative Text, the Author on the Novel, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition)

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: 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.