The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne)

Jun-Dai — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:00:00 -0700

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York: The Heritage Press, 1935

Began: 27 June, 2006. currently reading

(10 July) I’ve never read a book that meandered so much. So far, the first however many pages are dealing with the various characters that have to do with the main character’s birth. I wasn’t really expecting this much meandering; I was, in fact, expecting the story to be a series of stories within stories à la the film The Saragossa Manuscript (I presume the novel is the same way, but I haven’t read it). Also, Sterne’s use of parenthetical comments is quite over the top. At times I have to read a sentence three times just to understand its structure (that he uses dashes instead of parentheses doesn’t always help, since it flattens out the structure—when you see a dash, you can’t be sure if you’re coming to the end of a parenthetical statement or starting a new one inside of it), and the end result is a fairly fragmented understanding of the story (which is, presumably, what Sterne intended).

狂った!: The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne)