Where to start with Sterne
Tristram Shandy is the only book — read it slowly, accept the digressions are the form, and the eighteenth-century novel becomes more contemporary than most contemporary novels.
You have heard Tristram Shandy called the first postmodern novel, you have opened it and met the marbled page and the blank chapters and put it back down, and you want a strategy that lets you read the only Sterne worth reading on its own terms.
Reading Tristram Shandy at normal novel pace, getting frustrated by the digressions and the missing chapters and the visual jokes, and concluding Sterne is wilfully obscure. The actual project is a comedy about how no story can ever quite be told, and the obstacles are the comedy.
The reading path
- A Sentimental Journey (coming soon) — A Sentimental Journey is half the length and twice the warmth — the easier way into Sterne's mind before the longer comedy of digression arrives.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman — Read it in volumes, slowly. Uncle Toby is the heart of the book; the digressions about him are the form, not the failure. The marbled page and the blank chapter are not gimmicks — they are the eighteenth-century version of the formal joke that the novel cannot actually contain a life.
Why this order
Sterne wrote the strangest English novel of the eighteenth century and the most contemporary-feeling of any pre-Joycean novel, and the experience of reading it is the experience of a writer two and a half centuries ago doing every formal trick the modern novel still thinks it invented.
Held back, and why
- Sentimental Journey — Sterne's shorter second book — a comic travelogue. The textbook gentler ramp. Not in this catalog yet.