Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Laurence Sterne's mischievous sequel to Tristram Shandy follows the irrepressible Parson Yorick on a wander through France and Italy, and what begins as a genteel Grand Tour becomes something far stranger: an intimate reckoning with the raw stuff of experience. Yorick obsesses over a donkey, falls desperately in love with a玛丽 (a Frenchwoman), gets mistaken for a spy, and reflects endlessly on the proper way to blow one's nose. Sterne's innovation was to argue that feeling itself is a form of moral wisdom, that compassion, not reason, guides us through a chaotic world. The book famously dissolves into nothing, ending mid-sentence as if Sterne simply walked away from his own creation. Its chaos is deliberate: Sterne believed life itself is digressive, that the meaningful moments arrive unannounced. Two and a half centuries later, his insistence on the dignity of sentiment, on the comedy hidden in every human encounter, feels less dated than prophetic.