The 306 Greatest Books #167 - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The book can be found on the Norwegian and Observer Book Lists.

Published over the course of eight years from 1759 to 1767, Tristram Shandy represented a departure from the typical books of its day. This book may be more seen as the proto-stream of consciousness novel with the author frequently bouncing around topics like they were in a pinball game. Sterne would go from his primary story, those about himself and his family, to some obscure, barely related tangent in the blink of an eye. He would then realize his tangent and eventually work his way back to the story in question. Although this was clearly the purpose of the book, it got to be extremely irritating. The book is written as an autobiography and stream of consciousness from the perspective of Tristram himself. However, it became abundantly clear that the story wasn't even about Tristram when it takes the author a third of the book to get to his own birth. The book winds up focusing mostly on the life of his uncle, Toby, as well as Toby's servant Trim. But despite the frequent tangents, the book actually turns out to be quite funny. There are times when one of the characters are trying to tell a story of their own and they keep getting interrupted by the other characters, so that each time the one telling the story starts to tell it, a new chapter starts. The title of that chapter then says something like "trying this one again", where eventually it takes the story teller five chapters to get the story finished. Another funny thing is how the book is constructed. Looking at the book itself, I assume most versions are published specifically how the author intended because of the way it is written. In my version of the book there were instances where entire pages were blank or page numbers skipped over on purpose. One such section threw me through a loop because 10 pages were skipped along with an entire chapter. The author then goes on to explain why those pages were skipped over, stating that he purposely ripped out the chapter. It's definitely a clever way of approaching the book and one I had never thought of. Even besides the constant bouncing around of topics, I think the thing that makes this book really difficult for me to read, is the way that it is written. Sentences will seem to go on forever with em-dashes breaking up thoughts within the sentence itself, so it's difficult to tell where a sentence truly begins and ends. This is very reminiscent of the later James Joyce in his Ulysses, a novel I also did not enjoy. Overall, this book felt like a chore to read with the constant thought diversions preventing me from being able to focus on the story myself. Along with the author, I felt my own attention wandering throughout the book. But this is clearly a work before its time. It stands out as a masterpiece of fiction for doing something that nobody else at the time was doing and in a way that made it at least somewhat enjoyable. Would I recommend this for people to read, definitely not, but as a lesson about the history of writing fiction I can definitely see this novel as a significant contributor.