"Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne

 This is a classic of English Literature, written between 1759 and 1767, whose fame rests mostly on the fact that it is so surreal. It is the ur-novel of the 'stream of consciousness' style and is marked by digressions within digressions ("This is neither here nor there - why do I mention it? - Ask my pen, - it governs me, - I govern not it."; 6.6; on the other hand "There is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story." 7.1, but this book is all interruptions!) and by transcending the form of the novel, using blank (and black) chapters, and squiggles; it contains passages in other languages and (a few) footnotes. The Author's Preface is in volume three chapter 20!

It isn't easy to read! The speech of characters is sometimes juxtaposed and interleaved to the extent that it is sometimes difficult to know who is talking. Many of the narrator's digressions (and there are many) deal with philosophical and religious issues current in the middle of the eighteenth century which I needed explaining through the usually excellent notes to the Penguin Classics edition. Similarly, although it is famed as a bawdy book, full of double-entendres, many of these were lost on me; who knew, for example, that 'cabbage-planting' was a rude expression?

Just working out what was going on was a strain. "When a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader's fancy." (6.33) But the continual going backwards and forwards made it difficult for me to keep track.

The plot of the first two volumes revolves mostly around the gestation and birth of the protagonist whose nose is damaged by the forceps used by male midwife Dr Slop and whose name is misunderstood as Tristram because the maid Susannah, taking him to be baptised, can't remember his father's chosen name of Trismegistus. Later volumes include a journey from Calais to Avignon, and the amours of Tristram's Uncle Toby (an ex-soldier who spends most of his time talking about the campaigns in which he was involved before being injured in the groin). 

The characters include Tristram, the (initially not-yet-born) narrator, his father and mother, his Uncle Toby, Dr Slop, Corporal Trim, Obadiah and Susannah. 

It's influences include Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais and works by satirist Jonathan Swift, poet Alexander Pope, essayist Montaigne, and philosopher John Locke. I have read very few of these authors and so I was unable to appreciate the borrowings (sometimes amounting to plagiarism) or the satire.

The modernist 'stream of consciousness' writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were clearly influenced by Sterne's style.

To sum up, I found it very hard going. But who says a classic should be easy?

Selected quotes:

• "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." (1.1)
• "My mother ... knew no more than her backside what my father meant" (1.3)
• "The idea of duration ... is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas" (2.8)
• "The thought floated only in Dr Slop's mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the thin juice of a man's understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to the side." (3.9)
• "Wit and judgment in this world never go together, inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west ... so are farting and hickuping." (3.20)
• "Before an affliction is digested, - consolation ever comes too soon; - and after it is digested, - it comes too late" (3.29)
• "The Thracians wept when a child was born ... and feasted and made merry when a man went out of this world; and with reason. - Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it." (5.3)
• "The observation of Aristotle, 'Quod omne animal post coitum est triste'." (5.36)
• "Never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance" (7.32); Tristram holds conversations with a donkey.
• "There is nothing more pleasing to a traveller - or more terrible to travel-writers, than a large, rich plain." (7.42)
• "My father had such a skirmishing, cutting kind of a slashing way with him in his disputations ... that if there were twenty people in company -  in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of 'em against him." (8.34)
• "He knew not ... so much as the right end of a Woman from the wrong, and therefore was never altogether at his ease near any one of them." (9.3)
• "Friendship has two garments; an outer, and an under one." (9.23)
• "L--d! said my mother, what is this story all about? - A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick - And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard." (9.33; last words)

March 2022; 588 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God