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rushthatspeaksNow here is a book one should not read in a day. It is, as far as I can tell, all the best of the eighteenth century, meaning that it is brilliant and charming and witty, light on its feet and filthy in its humor and long as only an eighteenth-century author with the bit in his teeth can manage. I had seen the movie (which is extremely good, and successfully films an intrinsically unfilmable novel) and read various excerpts, including the chapter which is primarily a series of curving lines, but had not read the thing itself. I have spent vast portions of the day and night reading the thing itself, and loving every minute of it, but I do think it was unfair of it to keep growing another hundred pages every time my back was turned. I also think that it is unfair of the edition to begin its pagination over every time it gets to the end of one of the original volumes, as it means that you keep thinking that you have two hundred pages left, when in fact you have seven, or eight, or quite possibly twenty hundred. For as Tristram Shandy declares that he wishes it to be, I think this is the original expanding novel, which will eventually put out its tendrils and devour life as we all know it. He states that even if he produces two volumes a year till he dies, his memoirs will never catch up with himself, and this is a fair metaphor for the work it gave me as a reader.
I could, in terms of how high its quality is and how much I love it, wish it twice as long: but not in one day, dammit.
Anyway, I digress, which is appropriate, because Mr. Shandy has a digression on the subject of digression that I am genuinely considering writing out on a piece of paper and putting up on the wall in a frame. He holds that the digressions are the true meat of a story, but that his are better than other people's, which is to say that when other people are digressing, the story stops dead, so that in their works one may have either the momentum of a plot or the meat of a digression, and cannot get the good of both at once. But in his work, the digressions serve to cast light on the characters of the people in the story in a way that could not be otherwise achieved, so that every possible advantage of both plot and digression exists at every point, which is why everyone should go out instantly and buy all his volumes at the special rate currently offered by the publisher.
He is perfectly right and that is exactly what Sterne is doing. This book consists almost entirely of digressions. Well, and jokes. I haven't laughed so much at a book since-- all right, since I read that terrible YA problem novel the other day, but this one is intentionally funny. (I could go on about the difference between unintentionally and intentionally funny, and, perhaps, cite various authorities and hypothesize what Aristotle might have to say about it in his missing book on comedy. I have that ability. After spending a day reading Sterne, keeping to the point feels like something of a superpower, something other people do, mostly. Note that we have got this far and I haven't said a word about what the book is about. And won't-- I don't feel like it.)
At any rate, my point, and I do have one, was, if I remember correctly, that this is one of the great novels of the eighteenth century, or probably any other, for that matter. It exudes greatness at you. It is dazzlingly structured, brilliantly presented, contains a plethora of interesting character portraits that are both funny and genuinely touching, and is prepared to throw things at you unrelentingly until you give in. This is a book which made a man getting a hot chestnut down his trousers actually funny (the movie achieved the same effect and it was impressive there too). And it keeps doing this thing where it will have something in another language, presented side-by-side with a perfectly accurate English translation, and the differences between the two, despite that the English translation is perfectly accurate, will be hilarious. And it has the chapter which consists of a series of wavy lines illustrating the directions in which the author has left his actual narrative plotted over time; and the chapter in which he insists that if you are a sufficiently erudite person you will perfectly understand the significance of a page full of totally wordless and unintelligible printer scrawl; and the finest parody of an eighteenth-century scholarly preface I can imagine, which does indeed begin with him assuring you he won't say anything but let the book speak for itself. Not one sentence out of its forty pages has any semantic content whatsoever (and also said preface begins, in this edition, on page two hundred and nine). It's the sort of book you read bits out of at people.
And I really, genuinely think it expanded the entire definition of the novel, that before it the novel was not what it was after, not what it could be later. I am feeling Sterne backfill into the history of literature, in my hindbrain, and he turns up in some interesting places. So. My highest recommendation. But not, for all love, in one day. It was not built for that, and if this were a language that isn't English, I could build in the ambiguity about whether 'it' is my head or the novel, but as I am working in English this morning, please take it as contextually read.
(For some reason, when I think about Tristram Shandy, English is the fourth or fifth language that comes into my head when I try to write a reasonable sentence. I have no idea why. There it is, though. I have had to work very hard and rather painfully to keep from doing this review in French, which may explain some of the oddities of phrasing in it. It shows you what a great novel can do to the nervous system; another symptom, I notice, is that I have now again left my point behind entirely: and so enough.)
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I could, in terms of how high its quality is and how much I love it, wish it twice as long: but not in one day, dammit.
Anyway, I digress, which is appropriate, because Mr. Shandy has a digression on the subject of digression that I am genuinely considering writing out on a piece of paper and putting up on the wall in a frame. He holds that the digressions are the true meat of a story, but that his are better than other people's, which is to say that when other people are digressing, the story stops dead, so that in their works one may have either the momentum of a plot or the meat of a digression, and cannot get the good of both at once. But in his work, the digressions serve to cast light on the characters of the people in the story in a way that could not be otherwise achieved, so that every possible advantage of both plot and digression exists at every point, which is why everyone should go out instantly and buy all his volumes at the special rate currently offered by the publisher.
He is perfectly right and that is exactly what Sterne is doing. This book consists almost entirely of digressions. Well, and jokes. I haven't laughed so much at a book since-- all right, since I read that terrible YA problem novel the other day, but this one is intentionally funny. (I could go on about the difference between unintentionally and intentionally funny, and, perhaps, cite various authorities and hypothesize what Aristotle might have to say about it in his missing book on comedy. I have that ability. After spending a day reading Sterne, keeping to the point feels like something of a superpower, something other people do, mostly. Note that we have got this far and I haven't said a word about what the book is about. And won't-- I don't feel like it.)
At any rate, my point, and I do have one, was, if I remember correctly, that this is one of the great novels of the eighteenth century, or probably any other, for that matter. It exudes greatness at you. It is dazzlingly structured, brilliantly presented, contains a plethora of interesting character portraits that are both funny and genuinely touching, and is prepared to throw things at you unrelentingly until you give in. This is a book which made a man getting a hot chestnut down his trousers actually funny (the movie achieved the same effect and it was impressive there too). And it keeps doing this thing where it will have something in another language, presented side-by-side with a perfectly accurate English translation, and the differences between the two, despite that the English translation is perfectly accurate, will be hilarious. And it has the chapter which consists of a series of wavy lines illustrating the directions in which the author has left his actual narrative plotted over time; and the chapter in which he insists that if you are a sufficiently erudite person you will perfectly understand the significance of a page full of totally wordless and unintelligible printer scrawl; and the finest parody of an eighteenth-century scholarly preface I can imagine, which does indeed begin with him assuring you he won't say anything but let the book speak for itself. Not one sentence out of its forty pages has any semantic content whatsoever (and also said preface begins, in this edition, on page two hundred and nine). It's the sort of book you read bits out of at people.
And I really, genuinely think it expanded the entire definition of the novel, that before it the novel was not what it was after, not what it could be later. I am feeling Sterne backfill into the history of literature, in my hindbrain, and he turns up in some interesting places. So. My highest recommendation. But not, for all love, in one day. It was not built for that, and if this were a language that isn't English, I could build in the ambiguity about whether 'it' is my head or the novel, but as I am working in English this morning, please take it as contextually read.
(For some reason, when I think about Tristram Shandy, English is the fourth or fifth language that comes into my head when I try to write a reasonable sentence. I have no idea why. There it is, though. I have had to work very hard and rather painfully to keep from doing this review in French, which may explain some of the oddities of phrasing in it. It shows you what a great novel can do to the nervous system; another symptom, I notice, is that I have now again left my point behind entirely: and so enough.)
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