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    Tristram Shandy
    Tristram Shandy
    Tristram Shandy
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Tristram Shandy

    Written by Laurence Sterne

    Narrated by John Moffatt

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Tristram Shandy is an ironic masterpiece, a work of extraordinary originality, wit and learning. It is a work of considerable philosophical complexity but at the same time it is just a piece of flim-flam: it has been called the longest shaggy dog story in English literature. It is both a classic novel and an anti-novel. It includes passages of seemingly serious theology – but it can also be read as an elaborate bawdy joke.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJul 1, 1997
    ISBN9789629545628
    Author

    Laurence Sterne

    Irish-born Laurence Sterne was an eighteenth century English author and Anglican clergyman. Though he is perhaps best known as a novelist, Sterne also wrote memoirs, articles on local politics, and a large number of sermons for which he was quite well known during his lifetime. Sterne’s works include The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and the satire A Political Romance (also known as The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat). Sterne died in 1768 at the age of 54.

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    Reviews for Tristram Shandy

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      Life is too short. Gave it a shot, but waaaaayyyyyy too many other books that I would prefer to spend my remaining years reading. I'm kinda weird. I like a plot and characters and shit. No sign of either in the early going of this one. Buh-bye.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A funny, irreverent book, well deserved of praise.
    • 4/5
      There's scarcely a page's worth of Tristram's life in this satirical novel outside of a mad dash through France, but perhaps there's some of his opinions. Sterne's joke is that Tristram gets so terribly sidetracked into setting up the background for launching into his autobiography, he never really gets around to it. We are introduced to the circumstances of Tristram's birth - but then there comes an aside while he auctions his biography's dedication, and then come several details about the midwife who served at his birth; then about the parson who paid for her credentials; then the story of the parson's horse ... and already we are getting nowhere fast. Another 500 pages of this lies ahead. It can frustrate or amuse, and may often do both.There's all kinds of playfulness with exploring the limitations of literature, and in drawing comparisons with the strengths and weaknesses of other forms of art. The novel was a new and exciting form in the 1700s and Sterne was happy to indulge, but at the same time refute any thought that it was an ideal medium for delivering all human experience. When he uses a page and a half to describe someone's stance, it's of no matter except to demonstrate how poorly the written word captures what an actor conveys instantly. Similarly when he hums a tune, it demonstrates failure to convey an emotive melody. In addition, this work is littered with 1770s postmodernism: interrupting the narrative with a page of black ink or marbling, interweaving Latin with English translations and Greek footnotes, tossing symbols onto the page to illustrate a point, skipping a chapter or leaving one blank, etc. It's easy to find modern authors who 'push the envelope' (e.g. Lemony Snicket, Mark Danielewski etc.) but this work reveals they only follow Sterne's lead from centuries earlier.Sterne gets shovelled in alongside Fielding and Richardson as representing the state of literature in his period, but his format links more directly to the satirical works of Swift (especially seen in "A Tale of a Tub"). In that light there's many good bits: the cursing of Obadiah, Slawkenbergius' tale, the adventure of the chestnut, and nearly anything that prompts Uncle Toby to start whistling, to highlight a few. Doctor Slop might be my favourite character for dryly recognizing the nuttiness of the conversation, where even the digressions have their digressions. I anticipated I would find this "novel" either fun or frustrating. I've landed on the fun side but I could have done without Part Seven, and the last two parts contain signs of Sterne's diminishing health. This is a classic I'm glad to have read on paper. The Penguin edition's comprehensive endnotes were helpful, and otherwise I would have missed some of the gags.
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly fun! The post modern book before there was post modernism. Quite a lot of fun, but I do highly recommend reading this with a group as the humor is one that is fun to share and laugh out loud with, but also helps clarify points.
    • 5/5
      It took me almost a year longer than I originally planned, but I've finished The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. I loved it. I've seldom had so much fun with classic literature. And I'm pleased to say that Mr. Sterne saved his best for last. The final two books, probably the most popular sections in the novel, concern Uncle Toby's romance with the Widow Wadman who lives as tenant-for-life nextdoor to the Shandy estate. Mrs. Wadman has spent the length of the novel watching the growth of Toby's large scale model of the Battle of Namur where he recieved his groin wound. Over time, she has become attracted to Toby, both the the man and to the estate he shares with his brother. Tristram, our narrator, speculates that she may still want children as she is still young; the reader soon understands that whether she wants children or not, she clearly wants both romance and sex.One day she overhears Toby and his man-servant Trim discussing which is more painful, a knee injury or a groin injury. Afterwards, she is understandly interested in the extent of Uncle Toby's wound. She meets with him in the scenes that follow and finds Tody is happy to discuss his wound and more than willing so show her exactly where he was wounded. He takes her to the large scale model of the Battle of Namur, breaks out his measuring equiptment and pinpoints the exact location where he was standing when the bullet struck his groin. Widow Wadman is understandably frustrated. The end of the novel threw me for something of a loop. Sir Tristram is exponding on a grand point of philosophy to his brother Toby, Yorick and Dr. Slop, as is his wont, when Obediah comes rushing in to complain about Sir Tristram's bull. Sir Tristram's old bull was supposed to sire a calf for Obediah's cow, but the time has come and the cow has not calved, so suspicion has fallen on the bull. It can't be the bull's fault, swears Sir Tristram, becuase he goes about his business with grave expression thereby proving his capability. It's must be the bull's fault, says Dr. Slop for the cow was hairy at the time and therefore in heat. What's this story all about, asks Mrs. Shandy. "A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick--And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard."I had to look it up. A cock and bull story is a wildly fanciful tale that strays from subject to subject. The phrase may have come from Stony Stratford, England where there used to be two rival inns, The Cock and The Bull. At each inn, people would gather and tell boastful tales that often made fun of those who frequented the rival inn. That in the novel's final line Mr. Sterne dismisses the entire preceeding 526 pages as so much nonsense seems fitting to me. That he does so in a way that references breeding, Toby's war wound, and all that stuff about the importance of big noses from earlier in the book is just a little bit brilliant. A book like Tristram Shandy can't really have a proper ending; it simply has to stop. As it is, it's a very good stop.
    • 5/5
      One of my all-time favourite novels! You would not believe it was written in the 18th century for all the literary experiments it contains (black pages, crazy lines to illustrate the plot development...). Some readers may be frustrated with the rambling narrative, but if it suits your sense of humour like it does mine, you will love it. Really, it's just stark raving mad! Suck it, Martin Amis! This classic kicks some postmodern ass...
    • 3/5
      There’s nothing quite like this in all the books I’ve read. Although in its erudition and exuberance and experimentation and bawdiness and its massive digressions it reminds me in some ways of Melville’s Moby Dick, in other ways of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and in other ways of Joyce’s Ulysses. I can think of friends I bet would just love this book. The ones who loved James Joyce’s Ulysses? I bet you would find this a hit. This reads more like modern extreme whackadoodle than traditional novel. Well, it was written from 1759 to 1767 in nine installments back when the novel could hardly be called a tradition. There’s just all kinds of weirdness. The title character isn’t even born until the third volume of nine. (He keeps telling us he’ll tell us about it, then keeps meandering and rambling on different subjects.) There are lots of allusions to Hamlet, Don Quixote, and even Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Early on in the first volume, after a character dies, the next two pages are black as if in mourning. Later, the narrator talks about penetrating the meaning of the “next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!)”--and the facing page is--marbled. Two chapters consist of blank pages, other chapters appear out of sequence. In one chapter there are “squiggly graphs” and in another a “twirling line” as the Introduction puts it. There are mad uses of asterisks. And digressions are very much part of the design--Sterne revels in them: Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine;--they are the life, the soul of reading. --take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them;--one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All-hail; brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.The point seems to be pointlessness. And you know, in the end you really don’t hear much about Tristam Shandy’s life--even if you do hear much of his opinions. Ugh. This is just too rambling and chaotic for me. You know, I read that Sterne’s favorite author is Rabelais--and I detested his Gargantua and Pantagruel, especially because it was filled with bathroom humor. I couldn’t make myself finish Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” either, and as the Introduction to this edition notes, Sterne was indebted to both. If that’s more your style of humor you may revel in this. I liked this a bit more at least than either of its models, though not enough to feel this was worth enduring to the end. Parts I did find funny, and it’s often clever, but at 578 pages the extended joke of narrative interruptus wore out its welcome long before we ever got to Tristram’s birth.
    • 5/5
      Published over 8 years 1759-67. Read in 8 years, the first 3 volumes several times! Much easier to finish after appreciating the Sentimental Journey. Now to re-read. The jokes - in the words, typography, presentation - are as awesome as they are unexpected. The Rob Brydon/Steve whatshisname film, A Tale of cock and bull, inspired the reading effort back in 2011.
    • 4/5
      This book was decidedly strange and extremely inventive. Some parts were very funny and/or subtly bawdy. There were endless digressions about noses, groin injuries and hobby horses (although they may not have really been digressions). It took hundreds of pages just to get through the date of Tristram's birth. I listened to the audiobook read by Anton Lesser and he was very entertaining. I also followed along in the ebook. I think this book needs to be seen since there are all sorts of structural and typographical eccentricities.
    • 5/5
      Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs? for we are got no further yet than to the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom; and for aught I know, as my father and my uncle Toby are in a talking humour there may be as many chapters as steps; - let that be as it will, Sir, I can no more help it than my destiny:Tristram Shandy is one of my father's favourite books and he passed this copy onto me about four years ago. Two days after I started it, I found out that a film (starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and Gillian Anderson) has just been made of this notoriously unfilmable novel and has been getting rave reviews at film festivals. It's due out here in the New Year, so reading the book now was very good timing on my part.The shaggy dog story to end all shaggy dog stories. Supposedly the autobiography of Tristram Shandy, it is really a novel about how novel-writing and how a novel can't really hope to represent real life. Hardly a chapter goes by without yet another digression from the main story, as Tristram decides that we really need to know some other bit of background before he can continue with the action, and he only gets round to the author's preface towards the end of volume 3! It is a very funny book but quite heavy going, what with the 18th century language and the plethora of technical terms to do with siege-works causing continual flicking to the notes at the back of the book, so it has taken me getting on for four weeks to read.Favourite character: The wonderfully enthusiastic and sweet-natured Captain Shandy (Tristram's Uncle Toby).Most frustrating digression: Tristram's trip to France, which has nothing to do with the story and takes up the whole of Volume VII, just as he seems on the point of finally getting round to telling the story of Uncle Toby's relationship with widow Wadman. Best use of asterisks: The maid Susanna, who has forgotten to put a ******* *** under the five-year-old Tristram's bed, asking him to **** *** ** *** ******.
    • 4/5
      Although this is a tremendous book -- and tremendously important -- I am embarrassed to report I was unable to get all the way through it. It requires a quiet and consistent attention I currently lack.... I will try again later. I think it is brilliant, witty, inventive beyond description, and I can clearly see in it the roots of current contemporaries such as Vonnegut or even Pynchon.
    • 5/5
      I so admire this book! I guess I was not quite gasping when I finished this book, but I wish I could write like Sterne.
    • 4/5
      It's very funny, but the punctuation style (particularly the lack of speech marks) made it quite difficult to follow in places. Still, I think it was worth the effort.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant book. Laurence Sterne has become my friend.
    • 5/5
      I find it nearly impossible to review this, since it is one of my favorite novels of all time, makes me laugh even on a crowded Boston, MA bus and is apparently a classic that few people read (at least according to the essay in the back of my Signet Classics edition). Walter and Toby Shandy, Doctor Slop and Corporal Trim are as real to me as my bus companions -- more real, in fact, because at least the characters in Tristram Shandy have emotions.
    • 2/5
      Sorry, I could not finish this. I made it to about page 250. Which was better than anyone else in my book club. I felt better knowing no one else could finish it either.The same joke — 18th century English gentry’s formal speech is funny ha ha ha — for 600-800 pages depending on the edition you pick up is a bit much. Maybe there was something of a language gap? Yes, but everyone in my book club agreed that when we read Shakespeare we don’t have the same problem. When we read Grandpa Willie we read it and laugh and are amazed. Not so much with Sterne. I chuckled through first 30 pages and the rest was grind. It’s worth noting Shandy was originally published in installments so no one in the 18th century was hitting an 800 page monster.I admit there is probably a lot more going on thematically than I realize since I didn’t finish. Sometimes the aboutness of a work grows like a benign tumor (or maybe a malignant tumor in the case of a book like Infinite Jest). I reluctantly acknowledge my ignorance and bow out. I wouldn’t feel so bad about myself if the book I am reading in lieu of finishing Shandy wasn’t John Krakauer’s book about Pat Tillman. It feels low. Maybe that is not so bad. Maybe that is like choosing to watch Frontline over Masterpiece Theatre.
    • 5/5
      I'm not certain what it is about Irish writers and their wonderfully eccentirc sense of humour and their ability to turn conventional writing inside out and produce something rich and strange. Swift, Joyce, O'Brien, Beckett and Laurence Sterne are all in a lineage.The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a classic comic novel, written as an autobiography of Tristram Shandy, it is really about his uncle Toby and from the beginning, the novel takes wild digressions which, by the time you finish the novel, lead you right back to where you started.
    • 3/5
      I wonder what Sterne would have thought of all the theorising about this book? The introduction to this volume claims that we should read 'Shandy' because it will help us avoid the 'rationalism' of 'totalitarianism' of the twentieth century; that we are too much like Mrs Wadman, who wants to know if Uncle Toby has a penis or not. We should leave the fortress unpenetrated, the mystery unrevealed, the riddle unsolved.
      Of course, this idiocy is exactly what Sterne was writing against- not against rationalism, but against superstition uninformed by history or heart; not against rationalism, but against stupidity. That many literary critics (especially the 'postmodern' ones) can't distinguish between the two says more about the way we talk about our world than about the world itself, which is plainly and continuously stupid, and not at all rational.
      Roy Porter says this book is 250 years ahead of its time, but the truth is, Barth and Leyner - and all the over specialists without spirit & sensualists without heart - are 250 years behind it. Sterne exhausted the form he created.

      That rant over, this is a really funny dick joke. Plenty of the references are stale (unless you're really into seventeenth and eighteenth century theories of medicine, warfare, etc etc...), but you'll get the point pretty quickly anyway. But whatever you do, read it without the introductory material- there's nothing worse than explaining a dick joke as if it were an earth-shatteringly huge political statement, and Sterne knew it.
    • 4/5
      As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But central to the novel is the theme of not explaining anything simply, thus there are explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that we do not even reach Tristram's own birth until Volume III. However, beginning the narrative before one has been born is not unique in literature, for example see the opening chapter of David Copperfield. Consequently, apart from Tristram as narrator, the most familiar and important characters in the book are his father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, and a supporting cast of minor characters including Doctor Slop and the parson Yorick (no doubt inspired by Shakespeare).Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments of Walter—splenetic, rational and somewhat sarcastic—and Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated and a lover of his fellow man. "The long-nosed Stranger of Strasburg": Book IV opens with a story from one of Walter's favourite books, a collection of stories in Latin about noses.In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name, noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics, siege warfare and philosophy, as he struggles to marshal his material and finish the story of his life. What makes this novel remarkable is the seeming modernity of the technique and style. As with Rabelais, Sterne does not follow the "rules" for writing a novel, thus one encounters multiple allusions to other writers and their works and interjections of many kinds into the novel so that you begin to wonder what kind of book this is. Sterne was particularly influenced by Rabelais and his bawdy humor is no doubt due in part to that influence. This is not an easy read but one worth taking in small sections, a bit at a time. Having read Tristram Shandy you may be ready for twenty-first century post-modern literature or you may want to hang up the idea of literature altogether.
    • 5/5
      Digressive, dear sir? Yes! Bizarre, madam? -- Why, yes.... Bawdy? Well - Just read this passage quickly, madam, once through, without thinking --- and...Is it: Better in the first half? Sure. Sentimental? Certainly.A witty, whimsical, comic gem? - Absolutely!!!
    • 4/5
      Though it was sometimes infuriating, it was highly amusing in small doses. I am disappointed that it ended.
    • 3/5
      Not as hard as I expected but very digressive. Similar in style to Don Quixote…
    • 5/5
      A mesmerising read. I started reading this extraordinary shaggy dog story in August 1980. A friend warned me that nobody could get to the end of it unless laid up with a broken leg. I ground to a halt, and it was not until June 2018 that I resumed reading and reached the end. No broken bones, just lazing under an umbrella on a quiet Greek beach.
    • 5/5
      "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading; - take them out of this book for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them." Laurence SterneIndisputably the most fun one can have alone with a book. An absolute favorite.
    • 2/5
      Why is this book a classic? How is it that people have been reading this collection of words for 250 years? I read something a few years ago which put Tristam Shandy on my to-read list, but by the time I got started on it I'd forgotten exactly what had triggered my interest. I plowed through. The book has no plot, but continually hints that there might be a plot coming, if only you'll hold out a little while longer. It's just a series of anecdotes and digressions, and while it has some entertaining moments, on the whole it is one of the more mind-numbingly boring books I've ever read. But it's a classic, and I feel virtuous for having finished it. Now I'm off to read some 21st century pulp to clear my palate.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like it, because the persistent drollery kept seeming like it would develop into something really funny, and because the author seemed to be trying so hard, but this book really delivers little.
    • 5/5
      This is an odd novel, with a substantial portion of the content being made up of eccentric digressions and anecdotes from the main characters. There are bits of a storyline, but they seem only secondary to the rest of the book. But, this does not make it a bad novel; it works as well as many novels which have a strong storyline, though this style might not agree with readers who require more momentum.The book is made distinctive by its unusual formatting tricks, which would seem modern in a contemporary book, and must have surprised the eighteenth century reader and contemporary of the author. Combined with the silly humour, this produces a type of entertainment which comes as much from wit as it does from momentary bafflement. Some parts of the book become serious, but these usually have the effect of building up towards some irreverent jest or situation.Sterne was also a scholar, as is apparent from the book, as well as an inventive author, and it seems unusual that he only wrote a small number of books.
    • 5/5
      This is the funniest and most bonkers book I've ever read. My flatmates thought there was something wrong with me because there'd be all this noise as I stumbled about laughing, followed by silence as I'd have to lay down and rest. You're either wise and in possession of a sense of humour or you're not: you'll either read it or you won't.One volume editions are basically omnibuses of a nine volume work. I split it up and read a volume as and when I fancied it. Worked for me and it aped the original way readers would have come across it. This is a long and intense book. It would be difficult to read it though without flagging. Sterne definitely flags over the writing of it. I understand he was terminally ill at the time. Also, by splitting it you see more clearly how Sterne's meta-position as author shifts as he becomes self-conscious under criticism.A quick word on editions. The 1997 Penguin Classics edition and it's reprints is basically a reprint of the Florida edition (the standard modern edition) but with slightly fewer notes. Very lightly modernised. I recommend it. Whatever edition you go for, make sure it doesn't modernise the punctuation. A lot of the punctuation marks are jokes. Also, try to get an edition with notes. A lot of the jokes are about penises but there's a lot of stuff about John Locke which is frankly over my head.
    • 4/5
      I don't have time to finish this right now, but I aim to return to it one day. It's definitely entertaining, but lacking in forward motion. Seems like it would be a fun book to dip into regularly, without worrying about finishing, but grad school does not allow me that kind of leisurely reading at the moment. I'm about a third of the way through.
    • 5/5
      One of the three or four greatest English novels, by a master of digression and interruption and conversational conflict...oh, and of tone of voice. Sterne creates the major characters of Uncle Toby, Tristram's father Walter, his mother, and adds Toby's servant Trim, as well as Doctor Slop, and the parson, Yorick. Since Sterne was, like most of the English Poets Laureate of his time, also a parson, Yorick becomes a commentary. The pulse of the novel is Sterne's declaration that the more he writes, the further behind he gets, so that, in fact, Tristram gets born in Volume III. In the meanwhile, there is a standing joke about the window sash and castration, there are comparisons between seige warfare and obstetrics: in fact, there are so many unusual comparisons Tristram Shandy competes with "metaphysical poems" in unlikely analogies. Sterne's only follower may be James Joyce, who can also be funny, though possibly not as funny as Lawrence Sterne. Wonder what it was like to have Rev Sterne as your minister? What a hoot.