The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
1759
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
1759
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.
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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-e6b5b7e8-85af-4673-b205-19284ed8f46b.Sterne, L. (1759). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman-e6b5b7e8-85af-4673-b205-19284ed8f46bSterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman-e6b5b7e8-85af-4673-b205-19284ed8f46b.
