Some Words

I finished Tristram Shandy a few weeks ago. I haven’t really taken the time to write about it, and just saw the movie a few days ago, which was a nice coda to the whole experience.

I think that Tristram Shandy was one of the few classics which was not covered in a class at Carleton. I don’t know that for certain. I don’t have a course listing with me at the moment. Still, if I am right, I think that is a terrible shame. It was a strangely enjoyable experience. I don’t know that I have been simultaneously bored with and immensely entertained by a book before. Tristram purports to focus his story, and immediately bounces off in new directions. The problems for me came when he seemed to carry on with one fragment of narrative longer than others. It is a sorry statement about my attention span when a book renowned for it’s short attention span focuses on a topic too long.

Those longer passages got tedious to me when I read too many pages at once, but the page by page experience was hilarious. I think I have mentioned on here before that I do not often laugh while reading books, even if I find them very funny. Shandy had me laughing at several points.

The movie was an equally pleasurable experience. I managed to watch it all in one go too, which already puts it on a separate field from the novel, which was serialized. While many reviewers talked about how the movie could never film the actual book and focused instead on the feel, and staying true to the oddness of the book, I think they actually did an admirable job of getting the book in too. There were many quite pleasing parallels that I noticed and which benefit the reader of the book when watching the movie. K had not read the book when she watched the movie, and her characterization of it was that it was “odd.” This was amusing to me, because compared to the book, the film felt grounded, focused, and remarkably sensible.