chrissych 's review for:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

5.0

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Absolutely brilliant and almost unthinkably ahead of its time. Considered the father of stream of consciousness writing, this challenging, witty, tangential masterpiece explores the insurmountable unknowability of a person, the futility of truly telling a life's story, and the associative and seemingly random nature of memory and thought. Its format is unconventional for our time, let alone 18th century England-- the book makes abrupt and drastic shifts in time and place, in character, and in writing style, sometimes evolving spontaneously into French or Latin or an entirely visual gag (such as empty black pages when a character dies, empty white pages to describe a polar bear, line drawings to indicate the shape of the plot, etc.). It may at time's test a reader's patience with its absurdity, but Sterne knew exactly what he was doing when he made this beautiful mess. The end result is a hilarious and insightful novel about stories and how impossible really they are.