Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

I'm stubborn when it comes to abandoning books. I treat it as a challenge, like a game, myself against the book. Except while I may surrender to a game because my luck, reflexes, or spatial reasoning are not up to the task, I can't make that excuse with a book. A book is words, and it would appear that all that is necessary to finish one is to be able to read. I can read, so there is no reason for me not to finish.

Which is a foolish line of reasoning, obviously. By the same train of thought I should cut through my leg with a hacksaw. I know how to use a hacksaw, so there is no excuse for not cutting through my leg as I might any other object.

All of which is to say, I should have given up on this one. I strongly considered it at the halfway point, but that might have been one of the parts I found more readable, and let it goad me into pushing forward. After the first thirty or forty pages I realized the point wasn't really the story Tristram is trying to tell of his life, that helped a little. Up to that point, I'd been getting increasingly annoyed with how he would say he was going to tell us about one thing, then wander off-course from one seemingly irrelevant topic to another.

But all the digressions are just more opportunities to discuss the various aspects of humanity through Tristram's father and his uncle Toby. Problem #1 being you still have to be able to muster some sort of interest in whatever topic they're arguing over to be able to pay enough attention to get anything from it. Tristram's travelogue of his flight from Death through France made me want to kneecap him so the Reaper would catch up and finish him off. The parts where one character would try to tell a story or read something, only to be constantly interrupted and sidetracked could get maddening. Trim tries to cheer Toby with the story of seven castles, and can get scarcely one sentence in before being interrupted. Once, twice, three times, four. And if the interruptions don't tickle your fancy, you want Toby to shut the hell up so Trim will finish his story and they'll move on to something else..

Problem #2 is the overly verbose style Sterne writes in. It's not just the amount of words. It's how every sentence is filled with several clauses of disclaimers, qualifiers, clarifications, requests to his audience, etc,. Sometimes it works, and each one builds upon each other in a gathering momentum towards an actual point. Other times, I get to the end of a paragraph and find I've lost the thread of what he was trying to say in the word monsoon. Either that, or I'd see the word monsoon coming and my mind would drift to other topics while I read. Which leads to the same place: I reach the end of the paragraph and none of it actually registers.

I can appreciate the style of the book, the way one stupid diversion leads into another, or how Tristram will spend a chapter discussing which topics will get their own chapters later, like "buttonholes". Some of which may or may not actually get chapters. But it wasn't enough to make the book more than intermittently enjoyable to read.

'I told the Christian reader--I say Christian--hoping he is one--and if he is not, I am sorry for it--and only beg he will consider the matter with himself, and not lay the blame entirely upon this book,--

I told him, Sir--for in good truth, when a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader's fancy--which, for my own part, if I did not take heed to do more than at first, there is so much unfixed and equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and gaps in it,--and so little service do the stars afford, nevertheless, I hang up in some of the darkest passages, knowing that the world is apt to lose its way, with all the lights the sun at noonday can give it--and now you see, I am lost myself!--

--But 'tis my father's fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large, uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsalable piece of cambric, running along the whole length of the web, and so untowardly, you cannot so much as cut out a * * (here I hang up a couple of lights again), -- or a fillet, or a thumbstall, but it is seen or felt.--

Quanto id diligentius in liberis procreandis cavendum, sayeth Cardan. All which being considered, and that you see 'tis morally impracticable for me to wind this round to where I set out--

I begin the chapter over again.'