Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, originally written and published in a series of nine slim volumes from 1759 to 1766, reads like a dizzying and endlessly elaborate prank. Purportedly the life story of narrator, Tristram Shandy, he barely figures into it, not actually being born (offstage, at that) until volume three, and soon fades largely into the background again -- the tale being more about the Shandy family: from eccentrically intellectual father Walter to kindly Uncle Toby, hopelessly obsessed with scale-model recreations of military seiges. Or more accurately, it's about endless digressions upon digressions of intellectual obsessions, threaded throughout with bawdy humor (I learned some nice bits of antique slang from an era when slut was not an insult) and downright post-modern schtick. Black pages to mourn a dead character. Blank pages for the reader to fill in. Typographic tricks. Diagrams of the plotline and its diversions. It's a very strange read, sometimes feeling like Monty Python's smarter, crazier great-great-great-etc-uncle. And it all ends deep in flashback, with a barnyard joke that takes some brow-furrowing footnote reading to halfway comprehend. It's a book that leaves you scratching your head, but in a good, mind-stretching way. Others explain better than I.
If you can get hold of a copy, there is a very funny illustrated/comic-book version of Tristram Shandy by the English cartoonist Martin Rowson. It doesn't make the book one whit more comprehensible, mind.
Martin Rowson also did an excellent comic-book version of the Waste Land, without (due to legal objections by Eliot's widow) actually quoting any of the poem. It also works in most of the plot of the Big Sleep.
Posted by Alex Lawson at 08:23 AM, October 12, 2003.