Where to start with Sterne
A Sentimental Journey gives you Sterne's interruptions, jokes, and unstable narrator in a slimmer book before Tristram Shandy.
Tristram Shandy's blank pages and digressions sound inventive, but you want proof that the voice can hold you.
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.
Books in order
- A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy — 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.