Purporting to be an autobiography of the antihero Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Ster
ne's novel is a comic masterpiece of digression, egoism and sensationalism, as i
ts hilarious asides, explanations and host of memorable secondary characters - s
uch as Uncle Toby, Dr Slop, Parson Yorick and Widow Wadman - take centre stage,
at the expense of the actual life events the book sets out to depict. A humorous
compendium of European thought and literature - pastiching the likes of Locke a
nd Bacon and referencing Pope, Swift, Cervantes and Rabelais - emerges amid the
convoluted accounts of Tristram's conception, misnaming and accidental circumcis
ion by a sash window, in a shrewd narrative that examines the role and nature of
language itself.
