The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman.

A man sits down to write his life story and cannot get past his own conception, so tangled does he become in digressions, opinions, blank pages and interruptions — and somehow this is the joke, and the genius, of the whole thing.

What it's about

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is narrated by Tristram as an attempt to recount his life, which he approaches with such compulsive digression that events proceed almost anywhere but forward. Along the way we meet his father, the theorising Walter Shandy; his gentle, wounded uncle Toby, forever refighting old sieges in the garden; and a cast of eccentrics whose obsessions and misunderstandings supply the book's comedy. Plot is beside the point; the pleasure is in the swerve.

Themes

The novel plays endlessly with time, memory and the impossibility of ever quite telling a story straight. It mocks pedantry and system-building, celebrates human hobby-horses and quirks, and turns the very act of writing a book into its own subject.

Why it still matters

Astonishingly experimental for the eighteenth century — with its scrambled chronology, typographic games and self-aware narrator — Tristram Shandy reads as a forerunner of the modern and postmodern novel. Warm as well as clever, it remains one of literature's great comic performances, endlessly ahead of its time.

Who it's for

For readers who delight in playful, unconventional fiction, for anyone interested in the origins of literary experiment, and for those willing to trade tidy plot for wit, tenderness and the pure fun of a book that refuses to behave.