Painful, just painful from the start. Maybe it picks up along the way, but the whole idea of it suggests not. It is pre-modern post-modernism and has stream-of-consciousness writing of the worst kind, and (by design) it never goes anywhere.
Tristram Shandy is writing his memoirs, but he wants you to have the full context and flavor, so he needs to digress for several stories along the way, and from those stories, and into the philosophical or sociological points that come up along the way.
Tristram Shandy has a philosophical paradox named after him. It is one of the paradoxes of infinity. Tristram Shandy is writing a very accurate autobiography, and it takes him a year to write about one day of his life. Writing about that year spent writing would take another 365 years, etc. The paradox is that, given an infinite amount of time, he will finish. Somehow. (Infinity is infinity, so you can write infinite pages about infinite days in infinite years; there is no "bigger" infinity.)
I did not get as far as the meta-writing, when Tristram starts writing about writing. I wearied when he set out, immediately dropped back, and then started wandering along tangents. ADHD does not mix well with stream of consciousness and an old style of stilted diction.
The main problem is the horrible writing. I accept the idea of a story that wanders without ever getting anywhere, but each sentence is a painful step along the way. I presume that there is some mockery of others' style, but this book appears to have outlived them. Maybe he became a better writer over the years, by the time the last chapters were published.
By the premise of the book, it should not build upon itself much, instead just being more randomness in different varieties. The early varieties are horrid, so I am abandoning it early and moving on.
Amazon link
0 comments:
Post a Comment