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Title: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Classics) by Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New, Joan New ISBN: 0-14-143977-7 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Radical even in the 21st century
Comment: Composed long before there were rules about what a novel is supposed to look like, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" is a visionary piece of literature, a book so original in construction it almost defies genre. Conceived by an Anglican vicar who, under the comic influence of Rabelais and Swift and equally informed by Cervantes and Shakespeare, turned to writing fiction later in his life, it is an inadvertent masterpiece, the product of a writer who just wanted to have fun and entertain his readers and ultimately entertained generations.
The book is not a fictitious autobiography, although its narrator Tristram Shandy might have intended it to be; most of the story is concerned not with his life but with his idiosyncratic family and the circumstances surrounding his conception and birth, with many digressions on various related and unrelated subjects. His father Walter, whose conjugal duties coincide with his having to wind the clock the first Sunday of every month, compiles a compendium of information he calls the Tristrapoedia for the education of his newborn son. His uncle Toby, an expert in military architecture, rides a hobby-horse and occupies his time with the science of besieging fortresses. Other characters include Corporal Trim, a former soldier and now Toby's valet and factotum; Dr. Slop, a dwarfish physician who delivers the baby Tristram; and Yorick the parson, who naturally is descended from the infamous jester of the Danish royal court.
There are two aspects to this book that distinguish Sterne's style. The first is that he provides several different channels of narration and never really settles on a main plot thread; he interrupts the flow of one narrative with another, delivering narrative flights of fancy like a marriage contract, a sermon, a notice of excommunication from the Catholic Church, a travelogue for France and Italy, and amusing anecdotes about extracurricular characters. In this way he presages the modernism of many twentieth century authors.
The second is that he does not restrict his text to English words; he intersperses Greek, Latin, and French passages where he likes, and on occasion he does not even use words at all, but symbols and glyphs to express certain concepts. A cross appears in the print when a character crosses himself; a character's death is memorialized by a black page; a blank page is provided for the reader to draw (mentally or physically) his own vision of the voluptuous Widow Wadman, who has a romantic eye for Toby; long rows of asterisks and dashes are used for things that are better left unsaid. At one point Sterne even draws squiggly lines to illustrate the sinuosity of his narrative, celebrating his own whimsy.
"Tristram Shandy" was published in nine volumes over the last nine years of Sterne's life, and whether these were all he had intended is debatable because the narrative is implied to have neither a beginning nor an end; it seems very much like a work in progress. As such, by modern literary standards it may not be considered a novel, but in the sense of its unconventionality, its supply of so many bemusing surprises for the reader to discover, it is as literal an example of the term "novel" as there is.
Rating: 5
Summary: Ad ovo
Comment: Tristram Shandy begins to tell his story literally ad ovo... his unfortunate life begins its down turn at the very moment of conception when his mother turns away his father's attention by remembering the clock. Lawrence Sterne accomplishes one of the most humorous and yet innovative and unbelievably complex novels in history. While the reader waits for Tristram to come to the world, the characters are introduced through the most delicious and sophisticated game with ideas, opinions and ambiguous expresions, which connect, for example, uncle Toby's hobby horses with sexual behavours and problems of miscomunication. Misunderstandings reveal the unaccurate nature of language in a time when the illustration worked hard on capitalizing all human knowledge through the enciclopedia. A clever parody of the ideas of its time is what Sterne delivers with humour and resourcefullness. I find this book to be even stranger than James Joyce's "Ulysses", mainly because of its use of the page, in which he inserts lines representing the evolution of his tale, black spots, or he leaves a blank page so the reader can draw there. It is a truely memorable work of art, which everyone should read in order to put in perspective the literary works of the XXth century which are proclamed to be the most original pieces in history.
Rating: 5
Summary: Germinal comic masterpiece
Comment: There is so much in this novel one hardly knows where to begin, which is Sterne's hilarious problem for the first 300 pages or so. Tristram Shandy is a comic masterpiece, like Fielding's Tom Jones, which arose barely after the invention of the genre. Even Sterne's name almost seems a play on words and it's easy to see why great minds who followed Sterne like Nietzsche (Note "The Ass Festival" in Zarathustra), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), James Joyce (Ulysses) and J.P. Donleavy (Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, The Singular Man, Balthazar B., The Ginger Man, Saddest Summer of Samuel S.) admired immensely and were influenced by him. One has to love the way that Toby explains to Mrs. Wadman where he was wounded during one of her sieges of his fortress. One has to laugh at Sterne's tearing out of chapters, allowing the reader to pencil in his favorite profanities, making sense of pages of black ink, marbled patterns, blank pages and squiggled lines marking little ups and downs -- as obscure as the raw meaning of life itself. He writes chapters about whiskers, noses, buttons and nothing. I especially enjoyed the dedications to famous persons before several of his volumes. The epigrams were delicious and the careful reader is rewarded on every page for paying close attention to Sterne's often subtle comic style. Sterne certainly opened up the genre with an experimental literary style in which he created a vibrant, raucous, hilarious novel still relevant 300 years after it was penned. I can't say enough about the contribution of this comic gem to the literary works that followed, especially in Ireland. If you're a serious reader with a sense of humor, you'll be amused and enlightened by Sterne's intrepid wit.
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Title: Tom Jones (Oxford World's Classics) by Henry Fielding, John Bender, Simon Stern ISBN: 0192834975 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford Worlds Classics) by Samuel Richardson, Thomas Keymer, Alice Wakely ISBN: 0192829602 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, Angus Ross ISBN: 0140430210 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1967 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (Penguin Classics) by Samuel Richardson, Angus Ross ISBN: 0140432159 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: February, 1986 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, Leo Damrosch ISBN: 0451527321 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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