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4.8 ★★★★★
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★★★★★ 5
Brilliant stream of consciousness style, *extremely* humorous
"The Life and Opinions..." is perhaps impossible to really classify. It purports to be a biography of the fictional Tristram Shandy, but I don't think you can call something a biography when it only covers a year or so of the subject's life! I would say that more than half of the novel actually falls into the "Opinions" referred to in the title. The rest consists of short stories on Tristram's father, uncle, and a couple other minor characters.
I have never in my life read so many digressions from the topic at hand, most of which were utterly irrelevant but the charm of it is that Sterne *knows* they're irrelevant, but mockingly expresses his license of authorship in forcing the reader to go off on these sidetracks. His attitude is: "If you can't wait a chapter or two to get back to the story, well, go take a flying leap, I'm the author." Sometimes the digressions are exasperating. Very unlike Victor Hugo's signature habit of digressing, say when a certain main character in Notre Dame decides to enter the Paris sewers, Hugo takes thirty or more pages to give a history of the design and construction of the Paris sewer system. At least Hugo's digressions have *something* to do with the story.
Well, maybe that's the problem. There isn't a main story in this novel. It's not a storybook. There are many short stories nested within the main framework, but there is no real protagonist or overarching theme of any sort. Indeed, the end comes abruptly and there is absolutely no resolution of any conflict.
It's not trying to teach anything, really.
So what is it? I'm not sure. More a comedy than anything else. Right up there with Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" in terms of humor, but lacking the story. Maybe funnier than Dickens and just as clever. I was rolling in the aisles so many times I lost count.
I read the Penguin edition, edited by Melvyn & Joan New. The back cover does a better job than I could ever do in providing a sense of what you're getting into when you pick this one up:
"No one description will fit this strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece. It is a fiction about fiction-writing in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and a wry demonstration of its limitations."
It's a large work, it will take a while to work through. It's worth it. There are passages I want to go back to and make copies of to tape to the walls, they're that brilliant.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2005
★★★★★ 3
Interesting read, but takes some getting used to
I heard about this book on a blog, and figured I'd check it out. It's the rambling tale of a man determined to give you every last detail of everything that might be important to the narrative of his life. Unfortunately, he goes on tangets so often that he doesn't even get to his birth for several chapters, let alone the story of the rest of his life. Along the way, you're introduced to lots of random characters who are (at best) loosely related to the protagonist, but as often as not these tangents are fairly amusing.
The writing is pretty dense, and this along with the tangents had me putting the book down fairly often. It's probably ideal for a commuting book, but I never wanted to just sit down and blitz through big chunks of it.
Overall it's a very different kind of experience than a novel reader typically gets. It's worth a read for a change of pace, but I can't say it's a life-altering read.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2013
★★★★★ 4
Mixed Bag
Everyone should know, first off, that the Dover thrift edition is NOT a graphic adaptation. For some reason, Amazon has attached editorial reviews from the hardcover edition of the graphic novel version to this page.
Now, the book itself offers a range of experiences from delightfully hilarious to annoyingly tedious. Lots of the "funny" parts depend on an understanding of 18th-century social mores. I'm sure some of it went over my head but I'm enough of a nerd to have enjoyed most of the drollery. I think...
The story is whimsical, told all out of order by a scatterbrained, easily-distracted narrator. Tristram Shandy himself is hardly in the novel at all; aside from narrating it, he only appears momentarily as a newborn infant and then as a boy about 6 years old - and his role in both incidents seems peripheral to the carryings-on of the other characters. Each turn in the story reminds the author of something else, and he turns aside to tell stories inside of stories, each of which are necessary to give the reader some vital "background information" .. with the result that the main story hardly moves forward at all. It takes nearly 200 pages just for Tristram to be born! and even then the reader isn't quite sure it has happened since the conversations and minute actions of the other characters are magnified to such an importance that the narrator's own birth is hardly observed. For the most part this rambling comes across as "quirky and delightful" and the novel flows along quite pleasingly in spite (or perhaps because) of it. The digressions add layers to the story.
Except when they don't. The "chapter upon noses" which is a translation of a fictitious(?) Latin work by the great Slwakenbergius, has little bearing on the story. Like most of the book, it builds up to a climax and then stops short of resolution, leaving you to wonder what was the point. It leads nowhere, but at least it was interesting. The same cannot be said of Book VII, which is a sort of travel diary of Tristram (in the novel's "present" time) touring France by post-chaise. Although this is the only significant appearance of Tristram himself as a character in the book, it has absolutely nothing to do with the story/stories he was telling, and it is neither very interesting nor very funny. It serves as nothing but a pointless interruption, delaying the reader for 50 pages before getting to the part we were waiting for: Toby's courtship of the widow Wadman.
This last section goes along nicely for a while, and then the book stops. It doesn't end; it just stops right in the middle of a conversation, with the courtship unresolved and most of the reader's questions unanswered. This is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the entire novel, but I have to admit it's frustrating. I had trouble deciding whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars but I think it entertained me more than it exasperated me, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt ... and round up from 3.5. It's worth reading once, just for the experience - there's no other book quite like it - and the price of the Dover Thrift Edition can't be beat.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2010
★★★★★ 5
An extraordinary tale of an 18th Century family
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. A caution about the Everyman hardcover edition: they reprinted a later edition which groups Tristram Shandy into three volumes, not nine. And then they renumbered all the chapters! That's OK unless you read secondary sources that refer you to Book VII, Chap 4: good luck ever finding it.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2000
★★★★★ 1
A Total Sham-dy
What in the hell was this lunatic yammering about for all those 650 pages? What is the deal with his obession with noses, penises, and hobby-horses, hobby-horses, hobby-horses? Why does anyone consider it amusing when a writer keeps telling you he's going to get somewhere, but never does? Why is it entertaining at all to have blank chapters? Why is that cute? Why is that interesting? Who finds this funny? Who finds anything funny here at all? Why does this book of endless, mindless prattle, blabber, and piffle tickle anyone at all? Who finds digression to be enjoyable in literature? You? Why? Why? Tell me!
I checked the ratings on Goodreads. This is what it showed:
5 stars: 33%, 4901
4 stars: 28%, 4064
3 stars: 22%, 3268
2 stars: 9%, 1414
1 star: 5%, 848
Meaning: 95% of these readers are flock-following, digression-loving, hobby-horse riding loonies who have swallowed the Kool-aid. There is nothing here but vacuous thundergunk. Pure, putrid unenertaining garbage. If I would have laughed once - just once - during the reading of this book, I would have given it a whole extra star, but it couldn't even do that. I give him one star for spelling Tristram's name right, and even then, it's a made-up name anyway, so I may have been hoodwinked as well.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2016