But the author Tristram Shandy, is also giving us the life of his uncle.Įlizabeth: That's right. One of the narratives, as we said, is the life of Tristram Shandy. You just have to give yourself over to the narrative if you're going to get through the book.įrank: Elizabeth, there’s actually two narratives going on in this story. But it's more like floating in an ocean and letting it wash over you as opposed to reading a progressive narrative. I mean the title of the book is that the life and opinions so there's a lot of digression, there's a lot of tangents that Stern goes on, that don’t necessarily seem to make sense of the time, but then he revisits them in different forms throughout the book. This is not a very linearly structured novel, is it? In the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, hid opinions we get in abundance especially those about writers and writing and lawyers… actual details of his life though, we get much less.įrank: Phil, before we start our discussion of Tristram Shandy the character, I want to talk about the form of the novel itself. The adult Tristram Shandy relate certain aspects of his family history, including some events that took place before his birth.

Our novel written by Laurence Stern and published in a series of installments between 17, Tristram Shandy is both a fictionalized author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and the main character whose conception, birth, christening, and circumcision, form one of the major sequences of the narrative. Before we start our conversation about today's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, let me read a quick summary although I guess ‘summary’ is really not a good word for a novel that encompasses 600 pages. Thanks Frank.įrank: And now onto our show.

This week's novel conversations is about the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne and I’m joined by our Novel Conversations readers, Elizabeth Flood and Phil Setnik. So, if you love hearing a good story, you’re in the right place. We introduce you to the characters, we tell you what happens to them, and we read from the book along the way. For each episode of Novel Conversations, I talk to two readers about one book and together, we summarize the story for you.

I’m Frank Lavallo and this is Novel Conversations, a podcast about the world’s greatest stories.

The life and times of tristram shandy