★★★★★ 5
Brilliant stream of consciousness style, *extremely* humorous
"The Life and Opinions..." is perhaps impossible to really classify. It purports to be a biography of the fictional Tristram Shandy, but I don't think you can call something a biography when it only covers a year or so of the subject's life! I would say that more than half of the novel actually falls into the "Opinions" referred to in the title. The rest consists of short stories on Tristram's father, uncle, and a couple other minor characters.
I have never in my life read so many digressions from the topic at hand, most of which were utterly irrelevant but the charm of it is that Sterne *knows* they're irrelevant, but mockingly expresses his license of authorship in forcing the reader to go off on these sidetracks. His attitude is: "If you can't wait a chapter or two to get back to the story, well, go take a flying leap, I'm the author." Sometimes the digressions are exasperating. Very unlike Victor Hugo's signature habit of digressing, say when a certain main character in Notre Dame decides to enter the Paris sewers, Hugo takes thirty or more pages to give a history of the design and construction of the Paris sewer system. At least Hugo's digressions have *something* to do with the story.
Well, maybe that's the problem. There isn't a main story in this novel. It's not a storybook. There are many short stories nested within the main framework, but there is no real protagonist or overarching theme of any sort. Indeed, the end comes abruptly and there is absolutely no resolution of any conflict.
It's not trying to teach anything, really.
So what is it? I'm not sure. More a comedy than anything else. Right up there with Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" in terms of humor, but lacking the story. Maybe funnier than Dickens and just as clever. I was rolling in the aisles so many times I lost count.
I read the Penguin edition, edited by Melvyn & Joan New. The back cover does a better job than I could ever do in providing a sense of what you're getting into when you pick this one up:
"No one description will fit this strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece. It is a fiction about fiction-writing in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and a wry demonstration of its limitations."
It's a large work, it will take a while to work through. It's worth it. There are passages I want to go back to and make copies of to tape to the walls, they're that brilliant.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2005

