Silliness. Stuff and nonsense.
Inspired, metatextual, unbeatable silliness. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/tristram-shandy-by-laurence-sterne/

I first read Tristram Shandy when I was 23, more than thirty years ago, and still have the slightly mildewed paperback that I picked up off a Cambridge bookstall one day in late 1990. I can’t honestly tell you what happens in it; I can’t find any particular lines that resonate or are very quotable; the most memorable moment is when our hero’s penis gets caught in the windowframe in Book 5 Chapter 17. (Sorry for the spoiler.)

And yet somehow I love it. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time the stream-of-consciousness narrative, the refusal to make many concessions to the reader who wants to know what is actually going on, are part of the charm. It’s clearly an inspiration for Joyce, Woolf, and lots of the modernist writers who I really like; but it’s a book of its own time, requiring friendly engagement and repaying that engagement with warmth and humour. ( )

You almost feel that you are looking at the world through the eyes of a drunk, a very merry drunk, but a drunk all the same. This novel, Don Quixote, and John Barth's The Sot-Weed factor rank among my all-time favourites. ( )

This new edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the first book published by Visual Editions: a new London-based book publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction who make use of what they call "visual writing." They believe books should be as visually compelling as the stories they tell, and their strapline is "great looking stories." Their aim to publish The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as their first title is to show where the idea of "visual writing" originated, to show where it all began. The idea is to bring out the book’s brilliance and playfulness again, to dust it down from its shoddy Dover Classics image and make it accessible and relevant again to a more contemporary audience. Visual Editions asked the designers to breathe new life into the book and told the designers to add new visual elements in as well. As long as they stayed faithful to Sterne's spirit, then VE were happy to let the designers roam. And so they did: a shut door is a folded page, perspiration is pages of dotted spot varnish and the marbled page is a moiré of a black-and-white photograph (a nod to contemporary printing technologies, in the way that the marbled page was a result of technologies of the time). British author Will Self introduces the book, with the typically wonderful irreverence that Sterne himself would have loved.

Sometimes the archaic (even for the time) language and incredibly twisty sentences get a bit too much, but that's part of the humour. The way the book messes around with what a book *is* and the ideas of narrative structure are laugh out loud funny and made funnier by the things that also make it difficult to read sometimes. Highlights include a chapter where he plays the fiddle between events, including some incredible onomatopoeia, and a chapter which he begins by apologising for digressing constantly, describes the difficulties involved in writing as such for 2 pages, and then apologises again and starts the chapter again. ( )