Books this year: a book diary

You would expect a book purporting to be someone’s life and opinions to be about that person’s life. And, well, that’s the joke: Tristram Shandy contains only a few scenes from the life of Tristram Shandy. The book opens with his conception, but his birth doesn’t happen until the third volume (the book was originally published as nine short volumes over a ten-year period), and even then it happens “off-stage,” and is only mentioned briefly. Tristram is hardly a character at all in the book about his life - the major characters being his father Walter, his uncle Toby, and his uncle’s servant Trim - except as the narrator, which is the second joke: Tristram has opinions about everything, and no scruple at all about sharing them.

Not all the opinions are his, of course. His father, his uncle, and Trim all have opinions of their own, as do all the other characters, secondary, minor, and incidental, that appear in this book, and Tristram passes those opinions on to his readers, sometimes with and sometimes without comment.

This is, really, a book about nothing, the way Seinfeld was a show about nothing - that is, the plot is unimportant (and in Tristram Shandy, as good as nonexistent), but a good many subjects are discussed, though in nothing like a comprehensive or systematic way. It is full of digressions, omissions, false starts, loose ends, double entendres, puns, asides, apostrophes, and non sequiters - and, consequently, both fun and frustrating to read.

It’s hard to make a judgment about a book like this after only one reading, but I found it somewhat uneven; Sterne probably intended it to be that way, but there were some sections I had to struggle to get through. On the other hand, the parts that were funny were actually really funny, and the book as a whole is obscene, or obscene under a thin layer of winking “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I probably missed more jokes than I got, because I’m not up on my 18th-century slang; for instance, “Toby” used to mean “ass,” and “hobby-horse” used to mean “loose woman or prostitute” (among other things).

I don’t think I can recommend this book, at least in a general way; I enjoyed it, and will probably read it again, but it takes work to enjoy it, and the pleasures it offers are something of an acquired taste. It has, as I said above, very little plot, and not much in the way of character development - there is plenty of character exposition, but none of the characters change or grow or any of that nonsense; it’s more an exercise in testing the limits of the Novel as a form, as well as long dirty joke, or a series of shorter dirty jokes. If you want something of the flavor of the novel, but don’t want to invest a lot of time in something you might hate, watch the “movie” of the book: if you love it, you’ll love the book (probably), and if you hate it, you’ll hate the book. Probably.

A last word of advice: if you’re going to piss out a window, make sure the window will stay open on its own. Bad things might happen, otherwise.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Books Chris has read, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.