Total Page : 125
Publisher : Cliffs Notes
Publication Date : 1968 04
>> How to Ride a Hobby Horse
At the end of Volume 6 of this work Mr Shandy as the teller of his own life story provides a drawing of his narrative line over the previous volumes Each one is twisted beyond all recognition of course since he has been doubling back digressing and indeed doing pretty much everything except getting a move on He promises faithfully that in Volume 7 his narrative will resemble nothing but the very straightest of lines he s reached the hour of his own birth in six books and will proceed from that moment in strict chronology utterly without interruption At the beginning of the next volume however he suddenly tells us that the Devil is after him and races off to France in an attempt to outrun the old fox he doesn t get back to his own story until Volume 8
This gives you an idea of what you re in for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy consists primarily of the author s attempt to not tell a story indeed it s about practically everything in the world except its ostensible subject While the narrator s interruptions and digressions are generally funny in themselves there s an additional level of humor in the lengths to which he goes to get in his own way It s a great read but it makes things rather difficult when it comes to telling the story itself
There s a plotline of sorts to be sure which has to do with the night of Tristram s birth and what a complicated project that turns out to be In addition to that Tristram amuses himself with chapters on the nature of obsessions or hobby horses as he calls them chapters on how to argue with your wife chapters on sermon making chapters on chapters and even a chapter on digressions This last by the way consists primarily of Tristram insisting that he does not have time to talk about digressions and will do it later and when he comes to the end of the chapter immediately realizes that he has just written his chapter on digressions Yes it s a digression from the chapter on digressions that itself comprises the chapter on digressions Whew
Now this whole business begins with Tristram complaining that his parents should have paid more attention to what they were doing at the moment he was conceived it seems that his mother interrupted the marital act that night by suddenly asking her husband if he had remembered to wind up the clock You can see from this initial interruption that Tristram Shandy bears a pretty consistent tone throughout including the famous bit where Uncle Toby begins a sentence in Volume 1 Chapter 21 and doesn t get around to completing it until several chapters into Volume 2 Chapter 6 a gap of about 25 pages One might be tempted to think of this novel as just a nutty diversion from more serious matters
This isn t entirely true Structurally this thing looks like a Godawful mess but then again Sterne lived at a time when the structure of the English novel was still under construction More importantly although the content of the novel veers all over everything the thematic elements don t What you get here is commentary from a variety of angles on the pernicious effects of taking yourself too seriously Tristram s father for instance an intelligent man has retreated into the country for uninterrupted study and thus come up with some of the screwiest notions in literature He thinks for instance that a man s destiny is governed to an enormous extent by the size of his nose and by his first name of which the name Tristram is by far the most destructive So you can imagine how upset he gets when a faulty set of forceps flattens his baby son s nose at the very moment of birth and when an incompetent cleric christens the boy by that horrid name a few minutes later
All unbelievably ridiculous of course made more so by the careful studious and above all lengthy manner of telling Tristram quotes all manner of ancient and contemporary scholars on these subjects as indeed on all subjects Thus we come to understand that this kind of pedantry even on the most critical topic makes fools of us all
That is to say what makes all these interruptions and diversions so hysterical is that the narrator actually thinks they re all necessary he has his reasons for each and every one He s not just a madman on the contrary he s so intent on demonstrating what he means that all he comes up with is nonsense
Of course no one should require 450 pages to communicate a point like that so Sterne was careful to make all his sub stories as entertaining as possible He succeeded beautifully too Tristram Shandy was a huge popular success so much so that those who disliked it had to publish their disdain in the daily papers Which is fine except that many of them objected to the undeniably bawdy subject matter declaring that literature ought to have a moral purpose behind it and decrying the vulgarity of popular taste Sterne couldn t have come up with a better piece of nonsense if he d tried here were some of the generation s brightest minds getting as finicky about a harmless amusement as the biggest fools in the novel itself about their various hobby horses The author might as well have jumped up and yelled Gotcha
You might take that as a warning If you read this thing resisting its diversions from what you might consider good sense or taste it will trip you up on every page So just enjoy the ride
Benshlomo says What
>> Easier and cheaper than the bookstores
This was an easy way to buy my daughter s books for college We will do it this way from now on
>> Great performance
Anton Lessor gives a performance worthy of this classic I am writing a paper on Tristram Shandy for school and thought hey what the heck I ll listen to it in my car Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby are characters that rank with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza The phrasing and nuance that Lessor gives to Shandy actually provides more humour than you might find on your own Your get the benefit of someone who has read the material several times and knows where all the jokes are so you can benefit the first time around Thoroughly professional preparation is demonstrated by Lessor When Sterne writes or just what is a voice actor supposed to do Somehow Lessor makes a great decision almost every time That is what I mean when I say it is funnier than reading it on your own Uncle Toby and Walter talking about the right end of a woman is priceless
By the way the service from England by mail is pretty good so save some money and buy it from one of the third party vendors Enjoy
