Tristram Shandy

I saw the movie Tristram Shandy over the weekend. Very interesting, though I did get a little boring in the middle. The Washington post review of it is actually pretty accurate: it is a post-modern book written before there was a "modern," and the movie filmed it in pretty much the only way possible. I left the theater not exactly knowing what had happened, but with a strong desire to read the book.

Well I discovered that now you can, through the wonder of the internet, and by the convenient fact that "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," was written 40 years before US copyright law came into being. Click here: http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/TS/contents.html

What I think I like most about the book, of the first 10 pages I've read so far, are the long and wandering sentences. Laurence Stern (the author) clearly thought in whole blocks at once, and felt no need to break his thoughts down for the reader; he would just toss in a semi-colon and plow right along with his prose. If you consider sentences to be generally divided into units of thoughts, and also acknowledge that for some people consciousness is not so much a stream as a pool, then Tristam Standy seems to write by dropping water balloons on your head; you're startled, a little overwhelmed, but after some muddling you figure out what's going on. For example, the first sentence of the book is about as long as a whole page and ranges in topic from what his mother and father "had in mind" when he was conceived, to how this affects his temperature, body, mind and mood, to how his life might have been better off if they'd been considering something else.
Understandably, as a reader, you are a bit intimidated when greeted by this as the first sentence of the book...