Review: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's impossible to summarize this unique (and by unique I mean there's only one of them; I shouldn't have to say that, but I do) book, but here is an attempt to summarize it anyway:

A hapless but amiable 18th-century gentleman is so given to digressions that he hilariously fails to write his own autobiography, being too busy talking about his father, his beloved uncle, the local clergyman, the backstory of how he was born, his uncle's obsession with fortification, his father's crackpot theories about everything, and various minor matters arising from the foregoing, not to mention satirizing contemporary medicine, theology, and life in general, and at one point narrating his trip into France as an adult, so that (apart from the trip into France) he barely appears onstage in his own "Life" at all, and we never even get to find out for sure who his "dear Jenny" is or what their relationship consists of.

Because the author had an 18th-century gentleman's education, and I have a modern one, a lot of the detail goes over my head; I have small Latin and not a lot more Greek, and I haven't read most of the books he had read (and from which he apparently quotes freely without attribution at times, in contexts which recast the significance of the words in a satirical manner). But the enjoyment I do get is from the characters, including the character of Tristram, who, even if he's almost entirely absent as a subject of autobiography, is extremely present as a narrator. Uncle Toby is portrayed with tremendous affection, and his servant Trim with almost as much, as is Parson Yorick; all three are the kind of genuinely good-hearted and generous, if sometimes foolish, men we also encounter in the works of Henry Fielding. Tristram's parents are depicted brilliantly: his father, who never has the same opinion as anyone else on anything, but always comes up with his own nonsense and is incapable of being practical, and his mother, who infuriates her husband by always placidly agreeing with whatever he says, no matter how it contradicts what he said immediately before, and never even asking him to explain things she doesn't understand. It's a fun cast to spend time with.

Some of the nonsense, especially later on, did become a little tedious to me (it might have worked better for its original audience). But I'm glad I re-read it; I read it first in my father's set of Great Books of the Western World when I was a teenager (so, about 40 years ago), and didn't remember much about it except that I'd enjoyed it and it was exuberant and odd. I don't doubt that I understood even less of it then than I did this time round, but it jumps around so much that you don't get a coherent sense of very much anyway, so that is almost a feature rather than a fault.

And there, in further imitation of the book, I stop abruptly.

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