It's "English literary classics" week here at the Netflix reviewing labs. First we had Revengers Tragedy, based on a play from the early 1600s. Now we try out Tristram Shandy - A Cock And Bull Story, based on a nine volume serial written by Laurence Sterne in the late middle part of the 1700s.
The book has been the object of both veneration and derision by reviewers over the centuries. It is exceedingly tortuous to read. The fictional narrator (Tristram Shandy) sets up to tell us about his life, starting with the circumstances of his birth. But he keeps getting sidetracked with background stories and information about the people and events leading up to his birth, so that at the end of almost 600 pages of text, he hasn't quite managed to get himself born in his autobiography.
The author thinks nothing of breaking off a statement from a character such as his father or uncle in mid-sentence to explore the philosophical or experiential background that would lead to such an opinion, then returning to the scene and the quotation a chapter or two later. Chapters are filled with ellipses and em-dashes and asterisks, as well as quotations in Latin, French, and Greek. A couple of pages are solid black. One chapter has no content at all. The author engages in hypothetical arguments with his imagined critics as he writes his passages.
Some people find the book a masterful piece of bittersweet irony at man's inability to achieve his goals because of the constant interplay of factors beyond his control and the myriad interactions between unforeseen events that create our existence. Others find it a vanity experiment that is basically an overlong one-concept gag... Constant digressions violate the expectations of linear narrative.
The one thing everyone seemed to agree on in the last sixty years or so was that the work could not be turned into a film. Along comes British director Michael Winterbottom and a cast of British comedians to say "Pshaw" to that.
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