The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Here is a novel that begins with the moment of its hero's conception and still hasn't reached his birth by page fifty. Laurence Sterne's magnum opus is the most outrageously digressive book ever written: a story about telling stories that actively refuses to tell its story, spiraling through tangents about windmills, noses, obtuse angles, and the precise mechanics of how Tristram's parents might have done better. The Shandy family is a catastrophe of competing obsessions. Father Walter fumes over philosophy and the perfect disposition of his library. Uncle Toby is a gentle soul whose military enthusiasm manifests in harmless fortifications across the garden. Mother simply wishes they'd both come to dinner. Between them sprawls a parade of clergymen, doctors, and servants whose subplots threaten to swallow the main narrative entirely. Sterne littered his pages with blank chapters, black pages, marbled paper, and jokes about censorship, creating what may be the first truly postmodern novel: a book that knows storytelling is impossible and makes that impossibility endlessly hilarious. It is bawdy, brainy, and bizarrely alive.