The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

not really counting as “read” since I only read 3/9 volumes

I felt like I was reading this book for a really long time, but actually it took me two months, only because I interrupted this book with a lot of shorter, easier books. That makes me sound like a smug fast-reading jerk, which I might be. It took me longer than usual because I don‰ЫЄt find Sterne easy to read, I think because of all the dashes, although usually I love dashes all over the place and use them frequently myself. Usually I am all over this kind of thing, you know – Richardson, Fielding, all those bros, but Sterne‰ЫЄs prose kind of resists my brain sometimes, or vice versa. It‰ЫЄs the kind of thing I fully expect to fall head over heels for but I don‰ЫЄt. I felt the same way with A Sentimental Journey. I think Sterne had a lot of great things to say, was super funny and sharp but super sincere and sweet at the same time, but damn I just don‰ЫЄt find him readable! Maybe when I am older.

I finally pushed myself to finish it because I was eager to watch Michael Winterbottom‰ЫЄs film Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. We recently finished watching his series The Trip, also with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. I really enjoyed that series and am excited to see their treatment of this book.

I started off reading the paper book but moved to ebook because it was lighter to take in my bag (especially when I was reading something else at the same time but felt guilty leaving Tristram at home) but also because the dashes weren‰ЫЄt so huge in the ebook (—- vs –) which actually made a difference. Longer dashes = more stuttery reading, I guess? I guess.

There are so many hilarious bits in this book, but they aren‰ЫЄt pithy one-liners – most of the jokes stretch over a number of paragraphs, so that I ended up highlighting these swathes of pages for one joke or impressive insight. Which makes it a rewarding book to read but difficult to quote.

I confess to speed-reading through parts of it (especially near the end) and I probably missed a lot, mainly because I didn‰ЫЄt have the patience to understand it fully. Tristram went over my head a lot of the time and although there were parts where I did take the extra time to re-read and consult the footnotes and look up a word, and all that extra work actually paid off, I‰ЫЄm not used to reading that way unless I‰ЫЄm writing an essay so screw that noise. And there were so many threads that just fell away never to be found again. I would love to be an expert on Tristram but he‰ЫЄs joining a big group of books I would love to be an expert on, so get in line, Tristram. One day, when I am older, there will be no books left and I‰ЫЄll come back to this one and learn it inside out.

The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking, “this was written in the mid 1700's, really?!” Tristram Shandy is a testament to the fact that body humor was alive and well a couple hundred years ago. But even without the body humor, it's a bizarre book. I can't tell if Sterne was a genius or an imbecile who wrote in one continuous stream, never editing or reading what he'd already written, or both.

There are chapters with no content. Chapters with almost no content. Chapters with songs and scribbles and lots of dots and not much else. There are so many tangents and musings and minute details about the movement of an arm or leg or the position of the speaker that if it were't for these frequent deviations the book would probably only be about 10 pages long. It's an autobiography where the subject of the book isn't born for about 200 pages and once he is, is rarely the main character.

I laughed out loud throughout the book, but I have to admit that almost as often I found my thoughts wandering for pages. It goes from incredibly funny to inane and rambling to almost serious and back again over and over. Sometimes it was an test of patience to slog through it, more often I could hardly put it down.