Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne(1767)
NovelEnglish
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”
Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne(1767)
The narrator attempts to tell the story of his life and cannot get past his own conception, derailed by digressions about siege warfare, noses, knots, hobby-horses, and the opinions of his father, who believes a child's destiny is sealed by its name. Sterne's novel demolishes every convention of the form that had barely been invented, inserting black pages, marbled pages, missing chapters, and squiggly lines meant to represent the plot. Published in installments beginning in 1759, it bewildered and delighted a century that thought it knew what books were for. It remains the most joyful argument ever made that consciousness is not a straight line but an endlessly branching, endlessly comic labyrinth.
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Nabokov matches Sterne's delight in a text that keeps interrupting itself, but with menace instead of warmth.
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