The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne


The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also known as Tristram Shandy, is a novel by Laurence Sterne, inspired by Don Quixote. It purports to be a biography of the eponymous character. Its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. The first edition was printed by Ann Ward on Coney Street, York.
As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III.
Tristram Shandy has been seen by formalists and other literary critics as a forerunner of many narrative devices and styles used by modernist and postmodernist authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie. Novelist Javier Marías cites Tristram Shandy as the book that changed his life when he translated it into Spanish at 25, claiming that from it he "learned almost everything about novel writing, and that a novel may contain anything and still be a novel."
Sterne had read widely, which is reflected in Tristram Shandy. Many of his similes, for instance, are reminiscent of the works of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, and the novel as a whole, with its focus on the problems of language, has constant regard for John Locke's theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Arthur Schopenhauer called Tristram Shandy one of "the four immortal romances".
Tristram Shandy has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, French, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, Czech, Slovene, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Norwegian, Finnish.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

person AuthorLaurence Sterne
language CountryGreat Britain
api GenreGeneral fiction
copyright CopyrightPublic domain worldwide.
camera_alt Book cover-
book_online EbooksProject Gutenberg
description ScansGoogle-digitized
headphones AudioNo Audio
auto_stories Read onlineThe Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman