I’ve been feeling like my review for Tristram Shandy is going to have to go one of two ways: I share what I liked about the book, or I write a 7,000 word academic essay. Fortunately for you, I don’t have time for the latter. So this might be a bit more casual of a review than normal.
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a tricky book to review, anyway, because it doesn’t really have a plot. It was published as nine volumes over nine years, between 1758 and 1767, but this publication doesn’t have much to do with the meandering, digressive, and episodic form; plenty of books were published over multiple years, and they all had plots.
Okay, I admit, I’m still a little salty about the lack of plot. (Is salty still slang? Or have kids these days moved on?)
That’s my own fault, though, because I knew next to nothing going into the novel. In fact, I picked it up because last spring I worked on an early 19th-century diary written by a young American man who happened to love Tristram, and I was curious as to why he liked it so much.
Like my young diarist discovered more than two hundred years ago, it’s the novel’s very absurdity that makes it so charming. It invites us to laugh at the world, to see its comic aspects, to recognize that life is far too complex and random and strange to portray accurately in a traditional novel. And yet, it also refrains from descending into bitterness, instead remaining cheerful (but not saccharine) throughout. And once I realized that the plot was not simply forestalled but never arriving (and on purpose), I was able to enjoy Tristram much more. So don’t expect a plot. Just enjoy the journey.
The novel is not actually about Tristram, despite the very misleading title. While Tristram, as the vocal and active narrator, is kind of a character, we see very little of his life or opinions in the novel, and he almost never appears in the narrative. He isn’t even born until volume iv!
Instead, the main characters are Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father, Toby Shandy, Tristram’s uncle, and Trim, Toby’s butler/valet. These three men are delightfully quirky characters, and are drawn with wonderful complexity. Walter has strange opinions about noses and names, Toby was invalided out of the army and now researches battles by building models in his garden, and Trim is a kind, loyal, soft-hearted former subordinate officer and valet and friend who also happens to know more about the world than surprisingly innocent Toby. For example, Toby (my favorite character), despite his near-obsession with military campaigns, cannot bear to kill even a fly.
I should note that while the characters are complex, they are not necessarily realistic. Tristram is a comic, even satiric novel, belonging to the same family tree as Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and, later, Alice in Wonderland. Don’t expect Dickens or Richardson.
So, the characters are delightful, and if you let the narrator take you on a journey, you will find yourself delighted. Just don’t look for a plot.
Despite the seeming nonsense of the book, even a little contemplation of it will reveal that it has been very deliberately written and that Sterne knew full well what he was doing, even if Tristram doesn’t. It is bristling with literary allusions, allusions to (and quotations from) Sterne’s sermons, and a sharp awareness that this is a novel. Indeed, a lot of the book’s absurdity comes from Sterne showing us the limits of the novel form, which, it must be remembered, was still just a few decades old in the English tradition. One can try, like Henry Fielding does in Tom Jones, to be as realistic as possible, but a novel is still a written thing; its plot and characters imaginary.
Tied to this awareness of the limitations of the novel is a parallel awareness of the novel as an object. Sterne constantly reminds us that we are reading a book. His book is filled with quotations and paraphrases and copies of parts of books (real and made up). And Sterne will often use creative textual methods to make a point. When somebody dies, early in the book, there are two black pages following, which serve as mourning. Later, Tristram rips out a chapter he has written, and there is a corresponding blank page in the book. The font changes in the chapter headings to make a point. I found all of this fascinating, and would like to dig more deeply into that aspect of the book (but not here).
So, while I struggled a bit at the beginning, simply because Tristram was a creature I was not expecting, I ended up really loving it. I’ve used “delight” several times in this review already, but I’ll use it one more time, because that’s what Tristram Shandy is: delightful. It ended up being a pleasure to read, and left me with some rich material to ponder in the days to come. What more could you want?
Video review, in which I explore some of these ideas in more detail, here: https://youtu.be/JnClOiiIM7Y
I’ve been meaning to read this trilogy of ancient Greek plays, by Aeschylus, for ages, and I was delighted when one of my classes this semester forced me to actually do it. This is one of the books on my 
In play 2, The Libation Bearers, Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, comes home from the foreign country where he’d been for a while, and meets his sister, Electra, at their father’s funeral and decides to avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother, even though this will bring the Furies, the ancient goddesses of justice, on his head for killing blood. Apollo has commanded him to do so, and promised protection. [side note, Orestes is where the name of the trilogy comes from]
Something else I found very interesting was the way Aeschylus used his chorus. If you’ve ever studied ancient Greek drama, you probably learned that the chorus is supposed to be some anomalous group like “the people” or “the elders,” and this is how Sophocles (Oedipus Rex and Antigone) uses them. But Aeschylus uses his chorus much more complexly. They are the “elders” in play 1, but in play 2 they become the Libation Bearers of the title, and in play 3 they become the Furies. This shift from old men to old women to goddesses is very interesting to follow, especially when you factor in that these plays were performed on the same day, with the same group of people (all men, probably). Essentially, the chorus moves from being that more traditional group of commentators to being a major group of characters by the last play. It is also interesting to see how much power, both good and bad, women are afforded in this trilogy. While Agamemnon and Orestes are the main characters, their lives are both intensely shaped and influenced by the women around them.
This story follows Adam Bede, a young carpenter who lives in rural northern England, and the people who form his community in this village where he lives. Adam is a diligent worker and a good friend, who often judges too harshly and responds to the faults in others with anger instead of mercy. As the story opens, he is working for a local business owner and is admired and respected by his community, but several circumstances in his life are preventing him from doing all he wishes to do. One of the things he wants to do is marry a girl named Hetty Sorrel, but he doesn’t feel like he has enough financial stability to do so. While Adam is working through his own life circumstances, Hetty meets and falls for Arthur Donnethorne, the young squire who is a friend of Adam’s. Conflict ensues.
I continue to be amazed how well Eliot draws characters, how vivid and life-like they are. Even the minor characters, like Mr. Irwine or Bartle Massey, are so real. I do think the characters, generally, and Hetty, especially, aren’t as multi-dimensional as, for example, Rosamond Vincy or other figures later in Eliot’s career, but still excellently done. In addition, the plot was a little unevenly paced, and the action got rather dramatic at times. But as I want to emphasize, these are really only flaws in comparison to Middlemarch, which I think is one of the best English novels full stop, so they are minor flaws. As a first novel, especially, it’s marvelous. Eliot is a mature writer who rewards mature and attentive readers with an enormous feast of richness and truth.
(The next paragraphs flirt with some spoilers, so if you don’t want to know more, look away!). Eliot shows us that Hetty is a vain, selfish, and empty-headed young woman. She wants nothing more than to be admired and liked, but doesn’t actually like or care about other people very much. She literally spends hours in her bedroom looking at herself in the mirror and daydreaming about getting pretty dresses and basking in the attention she gets from men.
Dorthea Brooke longs to do something great in her life that will allow her to make the world better. She imagines herself marrying a man who will do something famous, a man like Pascal or Milton. Or Edward Casaubon, a neighbor who is working on the Key to All Mythologies. Dorthea marries him, full of idealistic dreams, and quickly is disappointed. She then must grapple with her ideas and ideals, trying to understand how she can fill her new role as Mrs. Casaubon.
Joe Kavalier moves to New York, fleeing Prague from the encroaching Nazi threat at the last possible second. He there meets his cousin, Sam Clay, who is about his age. Sam is an ideas guy, and when he realizes Joe can draw, he spots their opportunity: With his stories and Joe’s drawing, they can start writing a comic book together. In 1930s New York, the Golden Age of comic books is just getting underway, and Joe and Sammy are on the ground floor of the phenomenon.
Gilbert Markham is a young English gentleman farmer. His little community is set to gossiping when the beautiful and secretive Helen Graham and her son move into Wildfell Hall, the old home of the area’s squire. Gilbert and Helen become friends, but when rumors begin to spread about her, Gilbert asks Helen for the truth. She gives him her journal to read, and what follows is the account of a young woman who believes she can change her husband, but learns how wrong she is. Helen’s husband is verbally abusive, an alcoholic, and an adulterer. The story is really Helen’s; the bulk of the book is about her experience coming to terms with her horrible marriage and working out how she can deal with her marriage while still holding true to her own personal principles. I didn’t always agree with Helen’s perspective, but I could always admire her. It is a marvelous story. I read it quickly, staying up until the wee hours to finish it, something I rarely do with classic fiction. I believe this is one of, if not the first English novel to address topics like alcoholism and terrible marriages, and even though so many things have (thankfully) changed, I think its treatment of these topics is very timely.
This is a long poem divided into – you guessed it – four quartets, each named after a place: “Burnt Norton,” “East Corker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.” I had studied “Burnt Norton” in an Eliot class, but hadn’t read the rest of the quartet, and this really isn’t a work that should be read in pieces. In October, I picked it up and slowly worked my way through it over a weekend, reading and re-reading each section as I went along.
This is one of the oldest works of Western literature, and Wilson’s translation gives it a freshening that I think it really needed.
This novel is difficult to summarize without spoilers, so I’ll just say that it follows the life of Circe, from before her birth to — the end of the book (she’s immortal, you know, and #spoilers). Circe grows up in the palace of her father, Hyperion, generally ignored until she discovers she has a different kind of power from the other immortals. Her ability to control the qualities of plants and manipulate the natural world earns her the title witch and banishment to a solitary island. The turning point of the novel, although not the climax or the end, comes when Odysseus and his crew visit her.
Merrick Tremayne has been invalided out of the British East India Company, where he was a botanist and basically a smuggler. But he is asked to join one last expedition to Peru to recover Cinocha cuttings. The Company is having problems with malaria in India, and wants to begin a plantaion there so that they have easy access to quinine, the only cure for the disease. Merrick is asked to go not only because of his prior experience, but also because his family has connections to a Peruvian town called New Bethlehem. When Merrick arrives in New Bethlehem, he begins to learn what those connections are, and discovers the world is a little more magical than he thought.
This fantasy novel is the beginning of a series. Maniye is the daughter of a Wolf chieftan and the Tiger queen he had killed after Maniye was born. In this fantasy world, the Iron Wolves control the Crown of the World, and Maniye’s father, a secondary chief, has his eye on the head chief role. When Maniye learns that he plans to marry her to the man who killed her mother as part of his plan for personal advancement, she runs away. In her running, Maniye meets many people, both from the Crown of the World and from the Sun River Nation to the south. As it turns out, there may be something much bigger brewing…
I’m cheating a little and counting these two books as one, since they are essentially two halves of the same story.
I kind of picked this book up on a whim at the used bookstore, and then immediately kicked myself for not grabbing the rest of the trilogy. This is another fantasy, of the old-fashioned kind.
I feel like people have been slow to pick this new release up, and they need to get a move on! Circe is about the titan goddess by that name, the one whose best known for being a witch and turning men into pigs in the Odyssey. Beginning with the circumstances of her birth, Circe narrates her life for us, telling both a fascinating tale and contemplating her choices and actions. It’s a wonderful, unique retelling.
An adult fantasy that (nearly) avoided any kind of romance (*insert clapping hands emoji*). City of Brass then gets even better by being rooted in Middle Eastern mythology. Here be Genies, although they’re called, more accurately, Djinn or Daeva. Nahri is a thief living on the streets of Cairo in the early 1800s when she accidentally summons one of those Djinn. He realizes that she’s more than just a street thief, and takes her to Daevabad, the titular City of Brass. The only thing is, Daevabad is in the middle of its own political problems, and the arrival of the last surviving member of one of their most powerful families, accompanied by one of the most feared and hated Djinn in thousands of years, does not improve things.
Joe Kavalier escapes Prague in 1939 by the skin of his teeth and comes to live with his cousin, Sam Clay, in Brooklyn. When Sam realizes Joe can draw, he pitches a comic book to his boss, and the rest is history. Told over 15 years, and against the backdrop of the early days of WWII, mostly, and of the Golden Age of comic books, this thick novel is nevertheless surprisingly intimate. It remains focused on Joe and Sam, who both have strong, well-drawn and dynamic characters.
Hazel Motes is vehemently against religion, so much so that he founds the Church without Christ and starts preaching on the streets. In doing so, Hazel comes into contact with Enoch Emery, a strange and lonely young man with a mystical outlook, and sham preacher Asa Hawks and his daughter Lily Sabbath. The four characters and their four different perspectives on the world and meaning get tangled up together in O’Connor’s typically jarring and grotesque way.
While I was initially wary of this book–I cared for the main character and the Traveling Symphony and didn’t know if this was going to be a violent book–I ended up loving it. Spoiler: it’s not violent. (phew!).
This is a middle grade fantasy about Alice, a girl who is born into a world where color is the most important thing. But, except for her eyes, Alice is completely colorless. When the story opens, Alice’s father has been missing for three years, and together with Oliver, a boy from her town, she travels to another magical region called Furthermore to try to find him.
Tom Hazard was born in the 1500s. He has a disease that causes him to age incredibly slowly, meaning that he may be 400, but he only looks 40. In the present day, he is helped by the Albatross Society, an organization which finds and protects people like him. The Society’s biggest rule is to not fall in love, but when Tom moves back to London after centuries away, and begins to teach history at a high school, he finds himself attracted to the lovely French teacher. These three events – the move, teaching history, falling in love – lead Tom to reflect on his past life experiences, some truly tragic, others beautiful, and reconsider the necessity of the Albatross Society. But the society doesn’t want to let him go . . .
In this fantasy world, there is a city that no-one has ever been allowed to visit, from which impossible marvels have emanated, until they abruptly ceased two hundred years ago. And when Lazlo Strange is a boy, the name of this city suddenly disappears from the world. Nobody can remember it’s original name, so they call it Weep. Lazlo, an orphan boy raised by monks, later becomes an apprentice librarian with a deep fascination of Weep. Then, one day, an emissary arrives from Weep, the first anyone has heard of the city in two hundred years. Because of his deep knowledge of the city, Lazlo joins a delegation collected by the Godslayer to perform a mysterious task. To say any more would be spoilers.
Sense and Sensibility was Austen’s first published novel. It follows the Dashwood sisters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret. At the beginning of the story, their father dies, and their half brother John inherits everything. Thanks to his greedy, selfish, social-climbing wife Fanny, the Dashwood women, which include their mother Mrs. Dashwood, find themselves unwelcome in their own home. John is convinced by his wife, in a scene that is equal parts hilarious and depressing, that his deathbed promise to his father to provide for his sisters and stepmother really just amounts to giving them a Christmas present now and again. So the women now face a future of relative poverty.
In A Glass Darkly Sheridan Le Fanu
This book, published in 1913 and set in Nebraska around the turn of the last century (it’s not really specified), is about Alexandra Bergson, who emigrated from Sweden with her family a number of years before the story opens. Despite having two older brothers and a younger one, it is Alexandra, with a head for business and an intuitive feel for the land, who takes over the family farm after her father dies when she’s a teenager. The story follows Alexandra and her family and friends through the next twenty years as she prospers financially and yet still experiences deep suffering in other ways.
This play was first performed around 1611, late in Shakespeare’s career, and printed in 1623. It is about Leontes, the king of Sicily, who suddenly decides, for no good reason, that his best friend, the king of Bohemia, has been having an affair with Leontes’ wife Hermione. And Hermione is very pregnant. And Polixines, the friend, has been visiting for nine months. And they definitely (actually) did not have an affair.
for the undelivered note. He knew Romeo was quick to jump to self-harm as a solution.
ruling (I’m looking at you, Prince) can do to a community. At the end, the feud between the Montagues and Capulets is healed, but what future do either of the families have? None. Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Romeo and Juliet are all dead.
With the Classics 