Last Word on Tristram Shandy

According to this post I started Tristram Shandy on 13 August; I finished it last night. It was originally written in 9 volumes (small ones of about 70-90 pages); and it was a tough slog. If it weren't for blogging about it I would have given up. I think the book has plenty to commend it-- a surprisingly modern (dare I say "post-modern") absurdist sensibility and a ton of witty epigrams-- but, again, in the end it was a tough slog. What passed for outragous "bawdy" humor in 1760 hardly rates a grin today and the references to Pope, Swift, Cervantes and Locke assume a familiarity that, unfortunately, eludes the modern reader. (I was lucky enough to have read Don Quixote within the last couple of years; this was a big help). I'll file it away with Moby Dick and War and Peace as books I'll be glad to be able to honestly say I have read.

There are only 30 Amazon reviews for Tristram Shandy; under the pretentions of some of the gushing ones I found most of them to be pretty fair. The best one is #21, which is by reviewer "Kitchnsynch," which I quote here in its entirety (you can't link directly to an Amazon Review):

"First, let me address some common objections to the novel. Q: It's not about anything. A: That's because it's about everything. Perhaps above all it is a novel about pain--where language fails. Q: It's too long and erratic. A: Be patient. The prose takes some getting used to, but past the first 50 pages or so the reading experience can become incredibly addictive, offering many immediate pleasures. The narrator's digressions are of the essence; he is grappling honestly with problems of narration and temporality. Q: It's incomprehensible without historical background. A: Actually, what amazed me about the book was how timeless its interests and insights are. It's entirely possible to read through without any footnotes and still get everything out of it Sterne had intended to put in.

That being said, I'd also like to note for the record that this book is not simply some forerunner to "postmodernism." Yes--it's clearly the ideal 18th-century example for talking about hypertext, reflexivity, bricolage, metonymic slippage, etc., but to take the text as a merely textual experiment is certainly not the most interesting way to read it. Sterne is not reveling in play so much as he deeply understands the deeply human in the comic. I sincerely encourage everyone to try this novel. It's really one of the most original and poignant fictions I have ever read--right up there with Shakespeare, George Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, and Nabokov."

Here are a couple of quality websites on Shandy-- The Tristram Shandy Web and Laurence Stern in Cyberspace (which, oddly enough, is on the website of a Japanese University).