The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Sterne, Laurence, Adult Book / Fiction / Classic / Sterne, Laurence
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Sterne, Laurence	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Sterne, Laurence	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Classic / Sterne, Laurence	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Classic / Sterne, Laurence	4-week checkout	Due 05-03-2024

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A little crazy, highly entertaining submitted by stoutr on July 21, 2014, 6:14pm This isn't your typical novel, but if you take it with a grain of salt it's hilarious. Tristram is trying to tell the story of his life, but he has trouble figuring out exactly where to start. He keeps giving more and more back story, and takes an absurd number of pages just to arrive at the day of his birth. He spends much more time detailing the lives and opinions of everyone related to him, and plenty of non-relations as well, than he spends on his own. (Actually, it's a little like "How I Met Your Mother," where all the time is spent telling about everything except the meeting of the Mother.) Of course, life is never as neat and tidy as a simple beginning-middle-ending and a happy ending, so there's something to this.
Individual incidents are equally absurd, including unfortunate accidents to Tristram's nose and certain other appendages, a fake pregnancy, and a life-sized war re-enactment in the backyard.
The author also experiments with language and meaning, particularly making rather successful attempts at endowing innocent words with dirty meanings and getting the reader to catch on without explicitly explaining this new meaning.
If you enjoy absurd humor and meta-musings on things like story telling and why words mean what they mean and how we all manage to understand each other, you'll like this.
Fair warning: it is very long.