Tristram Shandy

Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy has been on my re-read list for a while now, and I'm finally getting back to it, and what a pleasure it is.

It's almost impossible to talk about Tristram Shandy without talking about the narrative tricks -- skipped chapters, "translations" from invented Latin sources, breaking the fourth wall, and so on.  There are very few post-modern tricks that weren't explored by this novel back in the 1700s.

But I think, on this reading, that those tricks, funny as they are, are not the reason we still read the book today.   Sterne's portraits of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby (not to mention the less-important characters like Yorick or Dr. Slop) are vivid and funny, even if one takes out all of the textual tomfoolery.

Another thing that's become more clear to me on this re-reading is that, as digressive as Tristram might be as a narrator, Sterne is incomplete control of his narrative.  He constantly alludes to the topics he's going to get to when there's time to do so, then seems to get sidetracked, but he does seem to always actually get there.  I think the longest tease is the references to Widow Wadman, whose story doesn't show up until near the end, but, even there, we do eventually get the story.