The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The original metafiction narrator, postmodern before there was a modern to be post about, Tristram Shandy bumbles his way through his pseudo-biography, unreliable to family and readers alike. He doesn't even manage to get born by the end of the first volume. And yet his innumerable faults only make me like him more.

I can't help but admire the chutzpah of a man who interrupts the story to offer the reader the chance to buy their way into the dedication–and for the bargain sum of only fifty guineas!

This was the moment when literature leapt off the page and became a way of life.

Tristram Shandy is a hugely experimental comic novel that relentlessly teases the reader – in addition to tangled plot lines and hilarious episodes there are passages where words are missing so as to encourage readers to fill in the gaps, and even a blank half-page on which readers are invited to draw their own picture.

This level of interaction inspired ‘Shandymania’, a cultural craze that included literary works responding directly to Sterne’s novel, illustrations of favourite scenes, souvenir crockery and souvenir fans, ‘Shandean’ recipes,… show more.

This book is brilliant. I have never finished reading it. Not because I disliked it, but because, by the time I'd reached the halfway mark, I'd fallen so in love with Sterne's plotless, digressive discourse that I had to quit reading and immediately begin writing Zebra Skin Shirt, a novel whose meandering nature owes a great debt to Sterne's 18th-century yarn. What's so special about Shandy? Here's a clue: it's so caught up in its own sub-sub-sub plots that our hero--the awkwardly-named Tristram Shandy--does not exit his mother's birth canal until the third volume.