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.