I first picked up Tristram Shandy when I was about 16. I knew nothing about it except that it was a Classic and therefore probably very boring. I was a big Kathy Acker fan at the time (still am, 14 years later) and liked the way she littered her books with strange pictures and diagrams. Imagine my shock on finding that Sterne had been doing the same stuff in the 1760s.
Tristram Shandy is one of the earliest so-called novels in the English language, but it's probably the most astoundingly innovative work of fiction ever written. When a character dies, there's a black page. When Sterne wants to demonstrate the randomness of life, there's a marbled page (marbling being a random process in the original edition - the point is now lost in mass-market paperbacks). When a character makes a gesture with his stick, there's an extravagant scribble. I had assumed, in my Teen Ignorance, that your typical Penguin Classic was a sturdy but boring narrative about supposedly real people doing this and that at interminable length. The brilliance of Tristram Shandy is that Sterne displays totally credible (if utterly daft) characters in a proto-Dickensian manner, while at the same time asserting the material character of the book in your hand.
I couldn't get academic about this book even if I wanted to. It's the most completely mad novel I've ever read. It's infuriating, yes, because Sterne is so good at the two things he's doing: telling a good story with living characters, and reminding you in his smirking whisper that it's only a story and that you're reading it in a book.
This edition is as up-to-date as they get, and besides having comprehensive and very useful notes (Sterne is big into the tradition of Learned Wit, and many of his allusions can be a tad obscure without a modern scholar explaining them) it includes the excellent introductory essay by Christopher Ricks, carried over from the earlier (1967) Penguin edition. The UK price is three quid; it seems almost indecent that such a stunning performance can be had for so little.
Dr Johnson famously remarked (in 1776) "Nothing odd will do long. 'Tristram Shandy' did not last." Almost a quarter of a millennium later, it's still there, tongue thrust firmly into cheek. It's worth the whole of Fielding, Smollett and Richardson put together, in my opinion.
