The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Gentleman

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (2003) by Laurence Sterne. Penguin Books. ISBN: 9780141439778. Condition: Very Good.

There are novels that tell a story.

Then there is Tristram Shandy, which spends hundreds of pages enthusiastically avoiding doing any such thing.

If you’ve ever met someone who cannot answer a simple question without first explaining what happened to their uncle in 1987, digressing into the history of umbrellas, recalling an amusing incident involving a goose, and only then remembering what they were originally talking about, congratulations—you already understand the basic structure of this book.

Published between 1759 and 1767, Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece remains one of the most astonishingly modern books ever written. In fact, "modern" scarcely does it justice. It cheerfully demolishes the rules of storytelling before most of those rules had even been invented. It skips backwards, leaps forwards, interrupts itself, addresses the reader directly, leaves pages blank, inserts squiggles and diagrams, and generally behaves as though the novel were an invention to be experimented with rather than politely respected.

The extraordinary thing is that it works.

Or rather, it works in exactly the way Sterne intended—which is not necessarily the way you expect novels to behave.

Nominally, the book concerns the life of Tristram Shandy. In practice, poor Tristram struggles to get himself born because the narrator keeps wandering off into stories about his father Walter, the unforgettable Uncle Toby, military fortifications, philosophy, noses, names, hobby-horses, medical mishaps and almost anything else that happens to drift through his wonderfully eccentric imagination.

It is one of literature’s greatest celebrations of distraction.

Readers encountering Tristram Shandy for the first time often experience a curious sensation. After about fifty pages they begin wondering whether Sterne has entirely lost the plot. By page one hundred they realise there never was a plot in the conventional sense. By page two hundred they discover they no longer care because the journey itself has become infinitely more entertaining than any destination could possibly have been.

It is, in many respects, the literary equivalent of setting out to drive to Edinburgh and ending up having the most enjoyable holiday of your life somewhere entirely different.

Sterne also possessed an extraordinary comic voice. His humour feels astonishingly fresh for an eighteenth-century writer. It is playful, self-aware, gently absurd and often surprisingly mischievous. Long before postmodernism acquired an impressive French vocabulary, Sterne was happily breaking the fourth wall, poking fun at literary conventions and reminding readers that books are, after all, wonderfully artificial things.

One suspects he would have had tremendous fun with the internet.

This handsome Penguin Classics edition from 2003 makes one of English literature’s great oddities accessible to modern readers, complete with the scholarly care that Penguin generally brings to classics. Whether you’re discovering Sterne for the first time or returning to one of literature’s most gloriously unconventional achievements, this edition provides an excellent companion.

This copy remains in very good condition, making it a fine addition to the shelves of lovers of classic literature, literary experiment, or anyone who enjoys books that steadfastly refuse to do what they’re told.

From Crappy Old Books—because every few centuries somebody comes along and completely rewrites the rulebook. Laurence Sterne did it in the eighteenth century with a novel that behaves less like a novel and more like an enthusiastic conversation with the most entertaining person in the room. Nearly three hundred years later, writers are still borrowing his tricks, critics are still marvelling at his audacity, and readers are still laughing as he wanders magnificently off course. If you’ve always wondered where modern experimental fiction began, the answer is here. It simply takes a wonderfully roundabout route to tell you.

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