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Title: Over-rated
Review: Tristram Shandy is a self-indulgent, pretentious mess. Laurence Sterne seems more concerned with his erudition than with telling his story. The novel is a sort of intellectual tease, as Sterne intorduces storylines, and then announces that he will complete the storyline later so that he can digress onto some topic that may have been of interest in 1760 (such as the description of fortifications) but which is of little interest today. By doing this, Sterne builds up and then frustrates our expectations, revealing Sterne as both vain in his self-indulgence and disrespectful to his gentle readers. One would need to be a classicist to understand the classical references littered throughout the book. Sterne could have told a story; instead he gave a lecture.
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