Tristram Shandy; and A Sentimental Journey

by Laurence Sterne

Tristram Shandy provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in a series of installments between 1759 and 1767. The ribald, high-spirited book prompted Diderot to hail Sterne as 'the English Rabelais.' An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is both a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction and a wry demonstration of its limitations. Many view this picaresque masterpiece as the precursor of the modern novel.

A Sentimental Journey, which came out in 1768, begins as a travelogue. Yet it ends as a treasury of portraits, sketches, and philosophical musings, for as Virginia Woolf observed: 'A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic--the philosophy of pleasure.'

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Humor, 18th Century, Literature, Ireland

832 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Laurence Sterne was an Irish-born English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption (tuberculosis).

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence...

Reviews

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne,
Melvyn New (Editor),
Christopher Ricks (Introduction)

48327873
Markus's review
Feb 27, 2020 · edit

it was amazing
bookshelves: read-in-english, classic-fictions
Read 2 times. Last read July 1, 2019.

TRISTRAM SHANDY
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768)

Tristram Shandy is the name of the hero of this fictional work which was first published in 1760.
Written in the first person, the reader may assume that the author speaks of himself.

The first half of the book speaks of the process of the birth of our hero. And even about his conception by his parents of him.

His mother giving birth, she would seem to have been the main character, but she is not.
She is hardly ever mentioned and is there in the background, in labour, upstairs.

Downstairs we have Tristram's father and his uncle, Toby Shandy and occasionally other friends and visitors in conversations about all and everything, religion, philosophy, literature, history and experiences.

Digressions are the main subjects of the book.
It takes up to about half the book before Tristram is actually born.

A lot about uncle Toby’s experience as a soldier and his unfortunate wound inflicted on him in the battle against the French at the siege of Namur in Flanders country.

And then there is more about uncle Toby and his falling in love with the problem for the future wife of not knowing if Toby is in a position to consume the marriage. Toby’s battle wound being placed in the most delicate place on the body of a man.

If there is not much of a continuous story to be found in this work, except the “Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy” there is however the extreme wordy and witty style and vocabulary that make this book outstanding and even exceptional.

This work could serve as TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language.
The reader who can read and understand this language fully and completely must indeed be good in English.

In modern times it is common to read works of fiction without any structure or frame;
the author is just writing down every thought that crosses his mind.

It was certainly unusual in 1760, and this work established its place as a classic and has retained it ever since.

Recommended reading to all admirers of classic literature.
12 likes

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am sure that this novel was quite witty and innovative in the early 18th century. In fact, I will tell you about it eventually, but first, I digress. Let me tell you about the first day of my life, which will take pages and pages to do. And I will tell you about it, but once again I must digress and discuss my Uncle, who loves staging his war campaigns and spends all of his time doing so. I am not sure how he will get along once war is over. He is being pursued by a widow. Which I will get to later. But back to the doctor having used forceps in my delivery, which ruined my nose, which is a bad sign, my father says. Along with my name which should never have been Tristram. That was a blunder, which I will eventually tell you about, along with an incident that happened to me in childhood, which upset everyone except myself. I thought it was quite funny and was not truly harmed. But back to the forceps...

I wish I could like this book. I will have to appreciate the ingenuity and humor of the author by assuming that the readers of his day appreciated his ingenuity and humor. In 2020, I just couldn't actually appreciate it.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is ridiculous. I love it.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a slog! Generally, I enjoy classic lit, even books that are considered difficult reads. But, humor is a fickle creature, and Tristram Shandy failed to amuse me. It seemed like a one-joke pony: the joke being that the narrator can't hold a narrative thread for more than three sentences in a row. And each new section was that same gag again.

Some of the individual rants and digressions were amusing, so I wondered if I might have liked it better if I'd read it more slowly, leaving a week or a month (or a year) between each section. It was like having a tedious houseguest who talks constantly and says nothing, but once in while has a brilliant moment that makes you laugh. The laughs weren't good enough to make up for the tedious slog, though.

I survived, but that's not generally how I like to feel at the end of a book.

[Eligah Boykin jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing experiment in grinding down Time to an almost complete halt and creating a new universe of temporality from that. I cannot say I always enjoyed this book what with all the obscure references to Latin and French terms and the sayings of philosophers and intellectuals both ancient and contemporaneous to Sterne's Life and Times. But it was something like a Zen experience getting to the end of all of Sterne's meanderings through the intellectual pretensions of the society in which he lived and I'm happy to say I made it!

The book is an interesting examination of the dispersal of energy and force that prenatal trauma can inspire much as the movie LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD was a fascinating exploration of what it is like to be caught in a last lover's tryst by a cuckolded husband with murder on his mind as you search for options to a way out of the inevitable. When digression takes possession of progression all hairy hell can break loose as the author takes infinite pains to present in all its most trivial details. Sterne has a backhanded way of confirming Tolstoy's observation that the banal is the essence of Life, but this is more a head thing than a heart thing, that celebrates getting nowhere with a sigh and a gasp that associates the heirs and the airs of sophistication with all that is ridiculous and absurd in Life. Sterne is taking us for a ride almost to that point at which even he does not appear to be fully aware of where he is going. But it's fun to recognize at the end that the force of intellect must sometimes surrender and admit itself powerless in the face of and to the force of Life, even when that latter force turns Eternity into an unmanageable and unwieldy mass of bothersome and irksome minor and major events that finally offers you relief when you step off this wacky train of associations.

Or something like that... now that I think of it... looking at Life through the lens of a prenatal trauma can be just as vexing and daunting as looking at Life through the lens of being discovered in an adulterous love affair with no way out but one... but then, that's a tale for another time...

[Daniel Hiland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sterne’s masterpiece of misdirection and satire has found a permanent place on my bookshelf. Ahead of its time, yet so much a part of it, Mr. Sterne found a way to tell a funny story by disregarding all the essential elements of storytelling. The book a gigantic parody of all that goes into writing one, it still somehow tells the story. You only have to be willing to allow yourself in on the joke.

Though the book was written in the latter half of the 1700s, it holds up well, considering that it came out in serialized form. Through it all, Sterne is the one having the most fun. He entices the reader by promising to return to the original subject- he just needs to go off an a tangent for a bit, first- yet doesn’t do so for scores of pages, if ever. He is occasionally bawdy, though even that is a tease within a tease. He plays with typography, grammar, punctuation, and format, even subjecting the reader to whole pages in Latin before returning to English.

The nice thing is that if you don’t finish the book after starting it, you can rest assured that the tale will never be fully told, if Sterne has any say in the matter. Highly recommended for lovers of satire and the English language.

[Judy]

The physical book disintegrated, so we got the electronic version. The narrative is rambling, the several speakers hard to tease out, the punctuation a chore to modern readers. Sterne uses and mocks various methods of discourse in propelling his narrator's tale, with many side trips. There are jokes, word play, address to the reader(s), and asides. At the moment half the book is read, and the narrator has not actually appeared in the story, other than by inference regarding construction of an appliance to repair to his nose and an unsuccessful attempt to invalidate his baptism.

I find the abrupt changes in address and style, as the switch from "quoth my father" to "the old gent" a bit irritating. The pacing...there is none. Subplots go nowhere, inside jokes are unsatisfying, and the author seems to take the reader as his confidant in the entire construction.

[Rajni Priya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, the gentleman took fiction into unknown realms, combining an entirely new concept in from with an idiosyncratic type of sentimental comedy. The publication of the first two of nine volumes brought the clergymen, Laurence Sterne, instant celebrity, but the novel's exuberant mixture of bawdry and virtuous feeling also provided considerable moral outrage, which the author relished.
An amorphous mass of inconsequential incidents, musings, reminiscences and countless hilarious digressions into side issues of the vaguest tangential relevance, make up this engaging anti-novel which has no beginning, middle or end and is dominated by the authors' vibrant personality which commands the readers' active participation.

[Lon Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most awful part of my required reading as an English major. Really not worth your time unless you want to somehow brag about having read it.

[Nadia · Rating 1 out of 5]

my biggest achievement this year is that I finished this book
#was unlucky enough to have this for my eng lit exam 😭

[Jan Fern · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in 1759, I get that this is a saucy and humorous novel. I could tell especially from the cd version. I found myself hearing the words but not listening or understanding. I blame myself. This is a highbrow kind of book, and I am not. I would describe it as analogous to blood pudding or liverwurst sandwiches: beloved and wildly popular in their time, but currently out of fashion except to a few palates. Again, knowing that it is rated as one of the best-written classic novels, I've chosen three phrases to describe the book:
1) what the heck...
2) make it stop.
3) I can't even.
I'm on chapter 13. As a lover of classic literature, do I hold my nose and eat the blood pudding, or pass and order a cheap hamburger instead? I'll give it some more time, just to be exposed to an excellent book that I still clearly don't get. the 2 stars is mostly for my lack of understanding of the novel, not for its quality.

[Alina Saari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kirjallisesti mullistava teos, joka sisältää paljon syviä ajatuksia, joista on välillä hieman haastavakin saada otetta. Pysäyttää lukijansa usein. Kertojan ajatukset ja tajunnantilat poukkoilevat kirjan sivuilla sinne tänne, minkä vuoksi esimerkiksi kirjallisuudentutkija Kai Mikkonen on kuvannut teosta yhdeksi ”vaikeimmin filmatisoitavista teoksista”. En yhtään ihmettele.

Elokuvantutkimuksessa on esitetty ajatus siitä, että ensimmäisen persoonan (yksilön psykologian) kuvaus ja nopeasti henkilöiden välillä vaihtelevien tajunnantilojen kuvaus (kaikkitietävä kertoja) ovat erityisen vaikeasti kuvakielelle käännettäviä seikkoja kirjallisuudessa. Yleisempää elokuvissa on se, että koko teos paljastuu henkilön sisäiseksi harhaksi (psykoosi, huumeet), kuten Fight Clubia (1999) esimerkiksi voisi tulkita.

Mielenkiintoinen yritys henkilöiden välisten tajunnantilojen kuvaamisessa on sarjassa Maniac (2018), jonka aloitimme juuri Netflixissä. Nähtäväksi jää, miten sarja tässä lopulta onnistuu.

Palatakseni Tristam Shandyyn, teos on merkittävä ajatustenvirittäjä intermediaalisuuden ja adaptaatioiden tutkimuksessa. Teoksen arvon tajuaa kuitenkin paremmin silloin, jos ymmärtää sen kirjallisuushistoriallista merkittävyyttä. Rakenteeltaan poikkeava ja vaikeakin teos, joten en suosittele vähän lukevalle tai kevyttä viihdettä etsivälle. Jos etsit jotain erilaista, tämä teos on sinulle.

[Robert Hudder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waiver between like and really like. There is a sense of play and fun in the book. Most of the humour is of the college variety. It can be pretty ribald without being explicit. Almost all innuendo.

This is really taking a piss out of autobiography. It makes me wonder why someone has tried something like this for the modern age. I suppose there have been attempts but this one has stuck around for a bit.

Anyway, aside from some of the diction and sentence structure, it is a modern read. Is it worth your time? I dunno. I do not feel ripped as I do from reading some other classics. Probably because of the satire.

Of course, some of the satire falls flat because we no longer have the referents. Sentimental journey is a travelogue that we would be familiar with today. Of course, fair amount of humour that might fall flat except travellers are still doing the same damn things.

[John P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tristram Shandy is a quirky, funny, oddly and profusely punctuated whimsical novel consisting of over 300 chapters (some very short, 2 completely blank (!)) over 4 volumes. There are moments of wisdom, wit, and social commentary but there are also many instances of obscurity due, no doubt, to the somewhat archaic vocabulary and sentence structure, and, certainly, to the odd and profuse punctuation employed throughout.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful example of 18th-century literature. The British dry humor shines bright. A must-read for all students of English Lit and the emergence of the modern novel. It takes till one-third of the way into the book until Tristram gets himself into the world in this first-person life story.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A life-changing masterpiece -- one of the most playful, inventive, unusual, maddening, and all-around exciting books I've ever read.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of it was very tedious, but some was hilarious.

[Jill Troxell Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not really sure what I just read...

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for a grad class. Once you get the hang of it, it's actually kind of an interesting book.

[Linda DiMeo Lowman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Satirical but wanders on and off topic. I was not willing to read over 800 pages of it.

[Tricia Florence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it but did not finish. I've got too many other books to read right now. I did see clearly how it influence At Swim Two Birds.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ridiculously difficult to read and in the end not worth the effort.may

[Lee Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what to make of this one. It's all over the place. It's less a novel than one long parlor joke. “Where was I wounded, madam?” It's more humorous than funny. It's slow and pretty weird. Would leisurely be a better word? The humor is mostly farce. It was undoubtedly daring and rather fresh at the time but is now a bit stale. I find most classics are like that. Tristram himself is more of a foil for the real stars of the novel, Uncle Toby and Trim. The monologue in defense of Toby's Hobby Horse (and Hobby Horses in general) is a great defense of eccentricity and laissez faire in private life. This was written to be read aloud. It would make a fantastic audio-book. It requires a certain state of mind.

My edition is a limited edition from 1935. It is a nice marbleized yellow, not that I'm bragging.

[Tiffany France · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really difficult to follow but brings to life the question of "who says we need to structure our novels in the same old way?" This comes before stream of consciousness but has life-like discussion-esque patterns to the writing. The sentences begin with a purpose, the diverge off to left or right, sometimes never resolving the initial subject. It's baudy and judgy and an all good ruckus. Tristam narrates his life being born with a smooshed nose and later wedding a widow. It's fun and crazy and not at all straightforward (even within the same sentence). This literary style is called "digress" and offers potential writers a free pass to write in whatever way they feel natural. It's rather liberating in that way. Three stars bc it was complicated.

[Christopher Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book nearly drove me crazy when I read it in college back in the mid-60's. I have a love-hate realtionship with it. Considering that Sterne used the device of stream-of-consciousness narration a couple of hundred years before it was invented, it's pretty amazing. Compare his technique with Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and you'll be surprised how "comtemporary" it is, despite the archaic style of language. Not an easy read, however.
If you want to read something form thjis period that is more accessible and far more rewarding, I would recommend Tobias Smollet's "Roderick Random"

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't care what you've read. You can't call yourself a literary snob until you've conquered this beast. (By the way, the movie that recently was made of this is surprisingly worth it. But don't watch it until you've read the book!!!)

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really like the concept of this: a fake autobiography in which the titular character is only "onstage" for about 40 pages. The whole story is about the detours and tangents. There were some hilarious moments, but I found myself growing impatient with some of the characters' antics.

[John]

I'm just getting started on the 1940 version, edited by James A Work. This is a really complete study edition with cool essays and background on Sterne, the 18th C and the book. I'm getting a pretty good feel with this edition, glad I happened on to it.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was super hard to follow. I'm
Not sure why it's a great book except that it does have interesting scenes of marriage and communication with particularly the birth arrangements, and how to make decisions together.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most unusual books I have ever read. It has some unforgettable characters and is quite funny. On the other hand, it has an unbelievable number of digressions, some of which are droll, others of which are just bizzarre.