In the Library
Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne, 1767
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 314
- Length
- Length 179k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, had minded what they were about when they begot me.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Tristram Shandy
A book with a reputation for being unreadably strange that is really one of the warmest and most companionable comic novels ever written, if you stop waiting for it to behave.
The reputation of Tristram Shandy is that it is impossibly experimental, a clever puzzle full of blank pages and squiggles and broken chapters that only specialists can love, the kind of eighteenth-century oddity you are supposed to admire from a safe distance rather than actually read. The strangeness on the surface is all real, and almost none of it is the obstacle people make it out to be. What is actually waiting inside is one of the funniest and most affectionate novels in English, narrated by a man so delighted by his own family that he keeps interrupting himself to tell you one more thing about them before he loses the thread for good.
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About the book
The book begins at the exact moment of its hero's conception, and immediately derails: mid-act, Mrs Shandy asks whether her husband has remembered to wind the clock, and Tristram blames every misfortune of his life on the interruption. That is the engine of the whole thing. Tristram sets out to write his life and cannot get near it, because telling any one minute breeds three more minutes worth telling, and because nobody in the house will stop talking. Nine volumes pass; he is barely born. What looks like chaos is the tenderest argument about people ever smuggled into a joke. Uncle Toby, gentle and wounded, lives forever inside the siege that maimed him, rebuilding it in miniature on the bowling green; Walter spins theories about noses and Christian names that no fact will ever confirm. Laurence Sterne gives you a blank page, a black page, a marbled page, and a hand-drawn squiggle for a plot, and somehow it is the most loving book in English about how hopelessly we each live trapped inside our own heads.