Tristram Shandy
I finished Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, another one of my TBR 2008 Challenge books. This is often hailed as the first post-modern text, and a few years ago, I saw a film adaptation A Cock and Bull Story, which I found to be a lot of fun. So I was quite looking forward to this. It’s a (very) rambling story where the narrator recounts his birth-paying particular attention to circumstances surrounding his conception, his father, and his uncle Toby. Sterne has no compunction about breaking off a chapter, just as it’s about to reach a resolution. It’s a narrative of interruptions, and so it requires a good deal of focus to follow the novel’s train(s) of thought.
Have any of you read it? What did you think?