The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Talk about your unconventional time scheme, and a book that’s more digression than plot progression! The eighteenth-century author Laurence Sterne, writing in first person as author-character Tristram (not Tristan), flat-out refuses to lay out events in chronological order (a decidedly Western way of telling stories) in the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The narrator moves back and forth in time, and though he sets out to tell his own story, by half-way through the book, we have not moved past the first day of his life! Yet eventually we see that the digressions and back story have revealed much of his life through the back window.

Because of its unconventional style and occasionally eyebrow-raising subjects, the book is a classic, but not my fave. The old-fashioned way of talking combined with the all-over-the-place narrative style left my head spinning. (How many more pages till the end?)

Still...one part made me laugh out loud. In showing the ridiculousness of letter-of-the-law reasoning, Sterne creates a scene in which scholars convince each other that a child is not related to his mother, reasoning that the law says in the event of the child's death the nearest kin will inherit the child's belongings--but a woman cannot inherit. Therefore, she must not be kin.