Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am trying to be more cautious with five-star reviews, but in the case of Tristram Shandy the rating is inevitable. This is the novel I think of when I read that someone in the modern realm has written an experimental novel or a groundbreaking novel – because Laurence Sterne wrote this book so long ago and basically made experimentation in fiction obsolete. His work predicts much of what would be called innovative and avant garde in later writers. He tells his story in nearly every way that a story can be told, and his novel is self-conscious, his narrator/writer very aware of the novel that is being written. It is the story of the birth of Tristram, the naming of Tristram, the family of Tristram, all at once. Unlike novels that sweep through an entire life in narrative waves, this book is discursive, and in some ways static: we think Tristram birth will be the beginning of a saga, but instead the narrative lingers on the moment of the birth, the past of the father and uncle, the disdain of the mother, the lunacy of the world, the history of wars in Europe – there is so much in the book that a mere cataloging of its contents does it nothing like justice. It is a timeless work simply by virtue of the fact of Sterne’s writing, which hovers over the story and points here and there at this oddity, this insight, that bit of story, that motif – all written with such beauty and grace. All of it, too, hilarious. There is nothing inapproachable, bombastic, or pretentious about this novel. Well, maybe there is bombast. Of the best sort. Always there is the narrator, Tristram, who promises that he will live an extraordinary life after his birth; and we can imagine that he did, indeed, keep that promise.