The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne's revolutionary novel announces itself with a premise as simple as it is maddening: a man will tell you the story of his life. Three hundred pages later, he still hasn't managed to be born. Tristram Shandy is the original unreliable narrator, a narrator so obsessed with telling you everything about everyone (his fussy father Walter, his innocent Uncle Toby, the hapless Dr Slop) that he cannot actually reach the present. Digressions multiply within digressions. A discussion of Uncle Toby's military obsessions somehow requires a forty-page essay on fortifications. A reference to a nose leads to a treatise. The book contains blank pages, black pages, and marbled pages, as if Sterne understood that words alone could never contain human experience. This is the novel that invented postmodernism two centuries early: a book that knows it cannot be written, attempts it anyway, and makes its failures the subject itself. It is also impossibly funny, bawdy, and tender, capable of pivoting from a joke about contraception to a sudden, devastating meditation on grief in a single paragraph. For anyone who has ever started a story and gotten lost along the way.
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“I begin with writing the first sentence”
— Laurence Sterne
“Human nature is the same in all professions.””
— Laurence Sterne
“Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?””
— Laurence Sterne
“Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.””
— Laurence Sterne
“…so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,--pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?””
— Laurence Sterne
“I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.--Accordingly I set off thus:””
— Laurence Sterne
“I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.””
— Laurence Sterne
“The availability of books is not the same as reading them, nor reading the same as understanding them.””
— Laurence Sterne
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.””
— Laurence Sterne
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Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman-54fbd8a6-67ce-4c8f-a744-4e8174a90b8a.Sterne, L. (n.d.). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman-54fbd8a6-67ce-4c8f-a744-4e8174a90b8aSterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman-54fbd8a6-67ce-4c8f-a744-4e8174a90b8a.
