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Title: The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Author: Lawrence Sterne
Genre: Classic literature
Thingummies: 3 (4 for literary influence, 2 for how much I actually enjoyed reading it)
Synopsis: Utterly hopeless. Ostensibly, about the life of a British gentleman in the 1700s. In reality, a series of diversions and extremely meta conversations about everything and nothing at all.
Thoughts: This is the Seinfeld of classic literature.
I wanted to like this book, I really did. The conceit is incredibly modern (or perhaps post-modern--I feel like if someone did this today, the critics would fawn all over him/her, which is kind of ridiculous given that this book's over 250 years old). Many of the lines are genuinely funny. Sterne is exceedingly clever (and knows it).
However, the fact that I was literally unable to read this book unless I was standing without falling asleep I think indicates that it fundamentally failed to hold my interest. (Thank goodness for a subway commute, or I never would have finished it at all.) Perhaps that is my own flaw, but I think my brain was trying to tell me something here.
Going back to the Seinfeld analogy, this is essentially a book about some fairly useless people, many of whom are rather stupid or dislikable, who fail to accomplish anything of note because they endlessly bicker about everything. No one can hold a single thought in their head straight to its conclusion, least of all the author. They're very entertaining in their ridiculousness. Unfortunately, I didn't like Seinfeld, either.
I think much of the problem for me is that the joke fundamentally wore thin. (Somewhat legendarily, this is a book that opens with the conception and birth of the narrator, who does not succeed in finishing being born until over halfway through the novel because of the number of digressions.) The conceit of the narrator who can never actually finish a story and so ends up over and over with a series of nested incomplete stories is entertaining to start, as are the lists, lengthy quotations, blank chapters, etc. But I feel like that worked for the first quarter of the book and then just felt like endless repetition of the same basic gags. It starts out hilarious, then moves into ridiculous, then tedium. I think the intention is to move through back into ridiculous/hilarious, but I just never quite got there.
Author: Lawrence Sterne
Genre: Classic literature
Thingummies: 3 (4 for literary influence, 2 for how much I actually enjoyed reading it)
Synopsis: Utterly hopeless. Ostensibly, about the life of a British gentleman in the 1700s. In reality, a series of diversions and extremely meta conversations about everything and nothing at all.
Thoughts: This is the Seinfeld of classic literature.
I wanted to like this book, I really did. The conceit is incredibly modern (or perhaps post-modern--I feel like if someone did this today, the critics would fawn all over him/her, which is kind of ridiculous given that this book's over 250 years old). Many of the lines are genuinely funny. Sterne is exceedingly clever (and knows it).
However, the fact that I was literally unable to read this book unless I was standing without falling asleep I think indicates that it fundamentally failed to hold my interest. (Thank goodness for a subway commute, or I never would have finished it at all.) Perhaps that is my own flaw, but I think my brain was trying to tell me something here.
Going back to the Seinfeld analogy, this is essentially a book about some fairly useless people, many of whom are rather stupid or dislikable, who fail to accomplish anything of note because they endlessly bicker about everything. No one can hold a single thought in their head straight to its conclusion, least of all the author. They're very entertaining in their ridiculousness. Unfortunately, I didn't like Seinfeld, either.
I think much of the problem for me is that the joke fundamentally wore thin. (Somewhat legendarily, this is a book that opens with the conception and birth of the narrator, who does not succeed in finishing being born until over halfway through the novel because of the number of digressions.) The conceit of the narrator who can never actually finish a story and so ends up over and over with a series of nested incomplete stories is entertaining to start, as are the lists, lengthy quotations, blank chapters, etc. But I feel like that worked for the first quarter of the book and then just felt like endless repetition of the same basic gags. It starts out hilarious, then moves into ridiculous, then tedium. I think the intention is to move through back into ridiculous/hilarious, but I just never quite got there.
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Date: 2011-07-20 05:19 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-07-20 05:35 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-07-20 06:00 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-07-20 07:50 pm (UTC)From:I also hated Seinfeld!
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Date: 2011-07-20 08:09 pm (UTC)From: