Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

This book is a huge literary in joke, which some more modern writers like to allude to. (Salman Rushdie in "Midnight's children" apparently) The odds are these days that unless you study literature to degree level, you will never hear of this book. There may be good reasons for this, as Sterne walks the fine line between genius and insanity in his writings. The novel form largely started with books written as though they were real life biographies or autobiographies - take "Moll Flanders" as a good example. "Tristram Shandy" takes this form and does truly unpleasant and funny things to it - from a certain perspective, it is a ...

*Tristram Shandy* is one long practical joke - a joke played on the reader. So it helps no end to be ready to have your leg pulled. But then all kinds of other things are pulled too - Tristram's conception is interrupted by his mother asking his father whether or not he had forgotten to wind up a certain clock; Tristram is accidentally circumcised as a child by a falling sash window; Tristram's Uncle Toby invites the lady he is wooing to put her finger on the very spot where he was wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur. *Tristram Shandy* is one of the most stylistically anarchic and original works in the English language. It was written in ...