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legallois 's review for:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
If you’re interested in the 18th century then this book might be interesting to you. I found it interesting, sometimes funny but I’m also interested in that time period. For someone with little interest in the 18th century or literature of that time, the book may just feel exhausting.
The book is long and it takes a lot of concentration to read it because the first person character is constantly digressing and into minute detail on irrelevant things to his main goal - writing the story of his life. If I missed a short transition into a digression, I could be confused for an entire chapter or so. That’s the main joke of the book however, that the first person character finds it impossible to stay on point. It’s funny sometimes but like I mentioned, it’s a very long book and after you “get” the joke, it becomes old well before the halfway point.
The main interesting thing about the digressions is that they shine a light on topics that normal novels of that period wouldn’t explore. We get snapshots into attitudes, common situations, beliefs etc that no other book I’ve seen from this period discusses. A lot of the time, however, the digressions aren’t as interesting as that and can be tedious.
As someone who lives in France, Tristram’s musings on different parts of France I recognise were quite entertaining. Particularly the bit about Paris looking nicer than it smells and the Parisian streets being so narrow that it’d be hard to turn a wheelbarrow around in them.
Despite the frustration of tolerating all the digressions and tangents, I found the book quite funny. The way that the first person character seems to not understand how to use chapters properly is often funny. He’ll sometimes start a new chapter just because someone else begins to speak. Some of his chapters are only a sentence or two long and several have blank pages.
Difficult to give it less than 3 stars considering how ahead of its time it was but I still wouldn't recommend this to most readers.
The book is long and it takes a lot of concentration to read it because the first person character is constantly digressing and into minute detail on irrelevant things to his main goal - writing the story of his life. If I missed a short transition into a digression, I could be confused for an entire chapter or so. That’s the main joke of the book however, that the first person character finds it impossible to stay on point. It’s funny sometimes but like I mentioned, it’s a very long book and after you “get” the joke, it becomes old well before the halfway point.
The main interesting thing about the digressions is that they shine a light on topics that normal novels of that period wouldn’t explore. We get snapshots into attitudes, common situations, beliefs etc that no other book I’ve seen from this period discusses. A lot of the time, however, the digressions aren’t as interesting as that and can be tedious.
As someone who lives in France, Tristram’s musings on different parts of France I recognise were quite entertaining. Particularly the bit about Paris looking nicer than it smells and the Parisian streets being so narrow that it’d be hard to turn a wheelbarrow around in them.
Despite the frustration of tolerating all the digressions and tangents, I found the book quite funny. The way that the first person character seems to not understand how to use chapters properly is often funny. He’ll sometimes start a new chapter just because someone else begins to speak. Some of his chapters are only a sentence or two long and several have blank pages.
Difficult to give it less than 3 stars considering how ahead of its time it was but I still wouldn't recommend this to most readers.