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    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    Audiobook21 hours

    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

    Written by Laurence Sterne

    Narrated by John Keating

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    About this audiobook

    Laurence Sterne's beloved comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the "biography" of Tristram Shandy-a wonderfully humorous and eccentric narrator who guides the reader from his conception to his birth, and on to his life as an adult. The twists and turns of Tristram's life expose him to such memorable characters as Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Dr. Slop and the Widow Wadman-whose own stories enrich the central narrative of Tristram's life. Published in nine separate volumes from 1759 - 1767, Tristram Shandy is recognized today as one of the first modern novels in English literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 21, 2016
    ISBN9781501929427
    Author

    Laurence Sterne

    Irish-born Laurence Sterne was an eighteenth century English author and Anglican clergyman. Though he is perhaps best known as a novelist, Sterne also wrote memoirs, articles on local politics, and a large number of sermons for which he was quite well known during his lifetime. Sterne’s works include The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and the satire A Political Romance (also known as The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat). Sterne died in 1768 at the age of 54.

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    Reviews for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

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    • 5/5
      Silliness. Stuff and nonsense.
      Inspired, metatextual, unbeatable silliness.
    • 4/5
      Tediously brilliant.
    • 2/5
      It's great if you enjoy obscure satire and dick jokes.
    • 3/5
      Wildly inventive in its time for its completely nontraditional approach, with infinite digressions and absurdities taking the place of most of the biographical story-telling, but a slog to get through 250 years later. The prose is dense, with countless references that require extensive footnoting to make sense of, and the humor is dated. Ironically the very first chapter of volume one is the most memorable, with Sterne wryly telling us of what happened while his father and mother were in the act of conceiving him. The portraits we later get of his opinionated father and his gentle Uncle Toby, who likes talking about siege warfare over anything else, are mildly amusing, as are the bits of high-brow bawdiness sprinkled in. Less interesting is the satire of various theories of the day (now quite obscure), detailed references to the works of John Locke, and the digressions that lasted for tens of pages, where the length I think was supposed to be part of the humor. This is a novel I liked more for what it represents than I liked actually reading, and had to take breaks from. When reading becomes such a chore, it’s telling you something.
    • 4/5
      It's been called the first post-modernist novel, skipping realism, naturalism, modernism, etc. That is perhaps an exaggeration, but it does seem to be in a class by itself.I thought Volume VII dragged a bit, taking us out of the Shandy households for an excursion through France. Perhaps the English loved both the critiques of the French and, I'm guessing here, the parody of Continental travelogues of the time.Overall, it can be a slog and try one's patience, and he seems to rely way too much on references to Burton, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other favorites to convey his opinions. And since I'm not of a mind to investigate the philosophers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries to "get" it, I must withhold any final judgement and just say there was some humor there that kept me going. Being very Church of England, Sterne wasn't afraid to criticize Catholicism, especially its more egregious acts in Spain and Portugal, those fun times for the tormenters of the Inquisition.
    • 4/5
      There's scarcely a page's worth of Tristram's life in this satirical novel outside of a mad dash through France, but perhaps there's some of his opinions. Sterne's joke is that Tristram gets so terribly sidetracked into setting up the background for launching into his autobiography, he never really gets around to it. We are introduced to the circumstances of Tristram's birth - but then there comes an aside while he auctions his biography's dedication, and then come several details about the midwife who served at his birth; then about the parson who paid for her credentials; then the story of the parson's horse ... and already we are getting nowhere fast. Another 500 pages of this lies ahead. It can frustrate or amuse, and may often do both.There's all kinds of playfulness with exploring the limitations of literature, and in drawing comparisons with the strengths and weaknesses of other forms of art. The novel was a new and exciting form in the 1700s and Sterne was happy to indulge, but at the same time refute any thought that it was an ideal medium for delivering all human experience. When he uses a page and a half to describe someone's stance, it's of no matter except to demonstrate how poorly the written word captures what an actor conveys instantly. Similarly when he hums a tune, it demonstrates failure to convey an emotive melody. In addition, this work is littered with 1770s postmodernism: interrupting the narrative with a page of black ink or marbling, interweaving Latin with English translations and Greek footnotes, tossing symbols onto the page to illustrate a point, skipping a chapter or leaving one blank, etc. It's easy to find modern authors who 'push the envelope' (e.g. Lemony Snicket, Mark Danielewski etc.) but this work reveals they only follow Sterne's lead from centuries earlier.Sterne gets shovelled in alongside Fielding and Richardson as representing the state of literature in his period, but his format links more directly to the satirical works of Swift (especially seen in "A Tale of a Tub"). In that light there's many good bits: the cursing of Obadiah, Slawkenbergius' tale, the adventure of the chestnut, and nearly anything that prompts Uncle Toby to start whistling, to highlight a few. Doctor Slop might be my favourite character for dryly recognizing the nuttiness of the conversation, where even the digressions have their digressions. I anticipated I would find this "novel" either fun or frustrating. I've landed on the fun side but I could have done without Part Seven, and the last two parts contain signs of Sterne's diminishing health. This is a classic I'm glad to have read on paper. The Penguin edition's comprehensive endnotes were helpful, and otherwise I would have missed some of the gags.
    • 5/5
      The prose is rather challenging (and borderline tedious) at times, but that's justr what you have to deal with to enjoy what is surely the finest collection of 18th-century dick jokes.
    • 5/5
      A mesmerising read. I started reading this extraordinary shaggy dog story in August 1980. A friend warned me that nobody could get to the end of it unless laid up with a broken leg. I ground to a halt, and it was not until June 2018 that I resumed reading and reached the end. No broken bones, just lazing under an umbrella on a quiet Greek beach.
    • 4/5
      It's very funny, but the punctuation style (particularly the lack of speech marks) made it quite difficult to follow in places. Still, I think it was worth the effort.
    • 3/5
      Phew! This book is funny, absurd, and exhausting. And has one of the best last lines ever--but did it need 600 pages to get there? There is so much going on in this novel, yet there is also very little. Tristram isn't even born until well into the book. His father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby (who really seems to be the main character), Toby's assistant/corporal Trim, Yorick, Dr Slop, Susanna, the Widow Waldman, Bridget, Obadiah. The war injuries, the mocked up towns in the garden, the doctor vs the midwife, Tristram's broken nose and wrong name, the clothing, the travel in France. Just everything. This is definitely dated based on the number of footnotes needed to explain people/books/events that we today don't know anything about. This makes it somewhat hard to read, as I am sure there are a lot of contextual jokes that even a footnote cannot explain. But this is a very unusual book. Certainly for its time, but also for today.But I am glad to be done.
    • 2/5
      (Original Review, 2002-06-20)Many very good books are not difficult to read--at least for the people who read them and have read them. But books can become difficult when difference of culture, or viewpoint, or language, or elapsed time intervene. Dickens is more difficult now than 150 years ago, and part of the reward of reading Dickens is the learning of how British society has changed. The difficulty of reading Virgil might include learning some Latin; the difficulty of reading Dante might involve at least a parallel text edition.The novel arguably presents a different formal challenge. Its name tells us it is new, and over the three centuries (or more, depending on what you think the first novel was) that it has been in existence. Novels have evolved formally. First person narratives, epistolary assemblages, impersonal authors then all the other novel forms of the novel that a literary historian might tell us about. A telling point about some of these historical accounts is that the writer often announces, in conclusion, that the novel is dead. Well, formalist literary historians can't be expected to write the next novel that defeats critical expectations, can they? That's the job of the novelist.There is a great deal of pleasure in reading a particular novelist one enjoys: that might either be in following a course of lifetime development, or in reading pretty much the same thing over and over again. Nothing wrong either way. But every time you pick up a book with expectations that it might be like the last book of that sort you read, and then you find it isn't, then there is a difficulty. Do you throw it away, or persevere?Obviously you don't want the same book again, but in many ways when you read a series of books by the same author you are getting pretty much the same book again. The difficult challenge comes when you step outside your own comfort zone. You might regret your waste of time and money more than once, but that will be balanced by your pleasure when you enjoy finding something new at least to you. If your bag is formal development of the novel, then discovering a writer who has moved the fictional goalposts a few meters will be even more rewarding.The biggest difficulty about reading is that there is far too much to read, and none of us have very much time, and we are most of us lazy creatures who resist change. If we want difficult books that are worth the time then there is plenty of advice: Dante for example. If we want to pick writers out of the current crop then we should be prepared to kiss plenty of frogs, and if we are really keen to learn another language or two.There are many ways for books to be good and some of those involve being 'difficult'. Ulysses or Tristram Shandy could not be the same if they were written in a more straightforward style. Their difficulty isn't some unfortunate characteristic offsetting their good points; it is intrinsic to their quality. The question you should be asking isn't 'If this book can be great and readable, why aren't all books as easy to read?'. Instead it should be 'are there difficult books that reward the effort?' As the answer is unequivocally yes, some books do need to be difficult.Good books "draw you in", and sometimes that drawing in is through complexity or through a breaking of expectations. Good books make you engage with them and with yourself. An encounter with a good book is similar to an encounter with another person: sometimes it just doesn't work, even though you want it to work. I never made it beyond chapter 2 of Tristram Shandy, despite many efforts ... but not because the book is difficult, but because the encounter just did not play out. Other complex books for me turned out to be true "page turners": Mann's Doctor Faustus and the Magic Mountain, all and any of Henry James, those many volumes of Proust. Few supposedly "readable" novels have the same effect on me, I guess because they do not make me experience a true encounter with something that matters. As to Lawrence Sterne, I had to make do with his "Sentimental Journey", I took it on my work commute for a while, one chapter a day on the train, I still remember those weeks. "Tristram Shandy" I will keep trying, but perhaps it is not meant to be.
    • 2/5
      Life is too short. Gave it a shot, but waaaaayyyyyy too many other books that I would prefer to spend my remaining years reading. I'm kinda weird. I like a plot and characters and shit. No sign of either in the early going of this one. Buh-bye.
    • 5/5
      Published over 8 years 1759-67. Read in 8 years, the first 3 volumes several times! Much easier to finish after appreciating the Sentimental Journey. Now to re-read. The jokes - in the words, typography, presentation - are as awesome as they are unexpected. The Rob Brydon/Steve whatshisname film, A Tale of cock and bull, inspired the reading effort back in 2011.
    • 5/5
      This is the funniest and most bonkers book I've ever read. My flatmates thought there was something wrong with me because there'd be all this noise as I stumbled about laughing, followed by silence as I'd have to lay down and rest. You're either wise and in possession of a sense of humour or you're not: you'll either read it or you won't.One volume editions are basically omnibuses of a nine volume work. I split it up and read a volume as and when I fancied it. Worked for me and it aped the original way readers would have come across it. This is a long and intense book. It would be difficult to read it though without flagging. Sterne definitely flags over the writing of it. I understand he was terminally ill at the time. Also, by splitting it you see more clearly how Sterne's meta-position as author shifts as he becomes self-conscious under criticism.A quick word on editions. The 1997 Penguin Classics edition and it's reprints is basically a reprint of the Florida edition (the standard modern edition) but with slightly fewer notes. Very lightly modernised. I recommend it. Whatever edition you go for, make sure it doesn't modernise the punctuation. A lot of the punctuation marks are jokes. Also, try to get an edition with notes. A lot of the jokes are about penises but there's a lot of stuff about John Locke which is frankly over my head.
    • 3/5
      Not as hard as I expected but very digressive. Similar in style to Don Quixote…
    • 5/5
      I find it nearly impossible to review this, since it is one of my favorite novels of all time, makes me laugh even on a crowded Boston, MA bus and is apparently a classic that few people read (at least according to the essay in the back of my Signet Classics edition). Walter and Toby Shandy, Doctor Slop and Corporal Trim are as real to me as my bus companions -- more real, in fact, because at least the characters in Tristram Shandy have emotions.
    • 4/5
      I do remember this extremely silly book. It was amusing.
    • 2/5
      Why is this book a classic? How is it that people have been reading this collection of words for 250 years? I read something a few years ago which put Tristam Shandy on my to-read list, but by the time I got started on it I'd forgotten exactly what had triggered my interest. I plowed through. The book has no plot, but continually hints that there might be a plot coming, if only you'll hold out a little while longer. It's just a series of anecdotes and digressions, and while it has some entertaining moments, on the whole it is one of the more mind-numbingly boring books I've ever read. But it's a classic, and I feel virtuous for having finished it. Now I'm off to read some 21st century pulp to clear my palate.
    • 5/5
      I so admire this book! I guess I was not quite gasping when I finished this book, but I wish I could write like Sterne.
    • 4/5
      A funny, irreverent book, well deserved of praise.
    • 3/5
      From the title, you might expect this book to be a memoir, or at least a story with a linear plot. If that is what you want to read, then DO NOT pick up this book. But if you want to be entertained and read about humorous thoughts regarding buttons, hobby horses, and other unrelated and bizarre topics, then this is the book for you. I was definitely surprised and entertained by this story.
    • 5/5
      One of the three or four greatest English novels, by a master of digression and interruption and conversational conflict...oh, and of tone of voice. Sterne creates the major characters of Uncle Toby, Tristram's father Walter, his mother, and adds Toby's servant Trim, as well as Doctor Slop, and the parson, Yorick. Since Sterne was, like most of the English Poets Laureate of his time, also a parson, Yorick becomes a commentary. The pulse of the novel is Sterne's declaration that the more he writes, the further behind he gets, so that, in fact, Tristram gets born in Volume III. In the meanwhile, there is a standing joke about the window sash and castration, there are comparisons between seige warfare and obstetrics: in fact, there are so many unusual comparisons Tristram Shandy competes with "metaphysical poems" in unlikely analogies. Sterne's only follower may be James Joyce, who can also be funny, though possibly not as funny as Lawrence Sterne. Wonder what it was like to have Rev Sterne as your minister? What a hoot.
    • 3/5
      I wonder what Sterne would have thought of all the theorising about this book? The introduction to this volume claims that we should read 'Shandy' because it will help us avoid the 'rationalism' of 'totalitarianism' of the twentieth century; that we are too much like Mrs Wadman, who wants to know if Uncle Toby has a penis or not. We should leave the fortress unpenetrated, the mystery unrevealed, the riddle unsolved.
      Of course, this idiocy is exactly what Sterne was writing against- not against rationalism, but against superstition uninformed by history or heart; not against rationalism, but against stupidity. That many literary critics (especially the 'postmodern' ones) can't distinguish between the two says more about the way we talk about our world than about the world itself, which is plainly and continuously stupid, and not at all rational.
      Roy Porter says this book is 250 years ahead of its time, but the truth is, Barth and Leyner - and all the over specialists without spirit & sensualists without heart - are 250 years behind it. Sterne exhausted the form he created.

      That rant over, this is a really funny dick joke. Plenty of the references are stale (unless you're really into seventeenth and eighteenth century theories of medicine, warfare, etc etc...), but you'll get the point pretty quickly anyway. But whatever you do, read it without the introductory material- there's nothing worse than explaining a dick joke as if it were an earth-shatteringly huge political statement, and Sterne knew it.
    • 4/5
      Although this is a tremendous book -- and tremendously important -- I am embarrassed to report I was unable to get all the way through it. It requires a quiet and consistent attention I currently lack.... I will try again later. I think it is brilliant, witty, inventive beyond description, and I can clearly see in it the roots of current contemporaries such as Vonnegut or even Pynchon.
    • 4/5
      Though it was sometimes infuriating, it was highly amusing in small doses. I am disappointed that it ended.
    • 4/5
      This novel cannot be described with just a few words. Probably one cannot describe the story at all. Tristram Shandy - or, more accurately, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - is an attempt by said Tristram to lay down the story of his life. As the story is interrupted by countless digressions which are themselves again interrupted by digressions the 'author' comes around to relating his birth only on page 195. Actually, not much is revealed of the life of Tristram Shandy. But you get his opinions on the importance of noses, of a name, and of hobby-horses. What is more, we get to know his uncle Toby quite well throughout the story."If I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, - or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along, - don't fly off, - but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears on my outside; - and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do anything, - only keep your temper." (p. 8)I think the quotation above describes the reading experience best: You laugh with Tristram, you laugh at him, you despair at points, you wish for something else and then again you're sucked back into the book. Reading Tristram Shandy is anything but your usual reading. Although this is not a five star book for me, I can surely see how people would rate it with five stars easily. But on the whole, it was not completely convincing and at times it was even a struggle. I can only recommend to give it a try, though, and advise you to "keep your temper". 3.5 stars.
    • 3/5
      There’s nothing quite like this in all the books I’ve read. Although in its erudition and exuberance and experimentation and bawdiness and its massive digressions it reminds me in some ways of Melville’s Moby Dick, in other ways of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and in other ways of Joyce’s Ulysses. I can think of friends I bet would just love this book. The ones who loved James Joyce’s Ulysses? I bet you would find this a hit. This reads more like modern extreme whackadoodle than traditional novel. Well, it was written from 1759 to 1767 in nine installments back when the novel could hardly be called a tradition. There’s just all kinds of weirdness. The title character isn’t even born until the third volume of nine. (He keeps telling us he’ll tell us about it, then keeps meandering and rambling on different subjects.) There are lots of allusions to Hamlet, Don Quixote, and even Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Early on in the first volume, after a character dies, the next two pages are black as if in mourning. Later, the narrator talks about penetrating the meaning of the “next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!)”--and the facing page is--marbled. Two chapters consist of blank pages, other chapters appear out of sequence. In one chapter there are “squiggly graphs” and in another a “twirling line” as the Introduction puts it. There are mad uses of asterisks. And digressions are very much part of the design--Sterne revels in them: Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine;--they are the life, the soul of reading. --take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them;--one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All-hail; brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.The point seems to be pointlessness. And you know, in the end you really don’t hear much about Tristam Shandy’s life--even if you do hear much of his opinions. Ugh. This is just too rambling and chaotic for me. You know, I read that Sterne’s favorite author is Rabelais--and I detested his Gargantua and Pantagruel, especially because it was filled with bathroom humor. I couldn’t make myself finish Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” either, and as the Introduction to this edition notes, Sterne was indebted to both. If that’s more your style of humor you may revel in this. I liked this a bit more at least than either of its models, though not enough to feel this was worth enduring to the end. Parts I did find funny, and it’s often clever, but at 578 pages the extended joke of narrative interruptus wore out its welcome long before we ever got to Tristram’s birth.
    • 3/5
      "Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! Read...for without much reading, by which, your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the meaning of my next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one." (III.35)

      There's the most-quoted bit from Tristram Shandy, which is full of references to obscure works, works made up, works misquoted, and works wholly plagiarized.

      Well, okay, Shandy is an experiment. Titularly the story of its narrator, it turns out to be something entirely different: a story about his uncle, his father, the passage of time, the difficulty of telling a story...noses...it's anything other than Tristram Shandy's story. It's been described as a perfect capture of the way the mind works: twisting back on itself, skipping, tangentializing. And yeah, that's how my mind works, too, and as far as that documentation goes, it's bravura. But isn't the point of writing a novel to concentrate your mind, to focus all those disparate thoughts into a coherent whole? If I wrote down my mind right now, I would tell you about this book, Eric B & Rakim on my CD player, my dog snoring, my wife asleep, my left calf aching slightly, the wine in my mouth, I suspect this review doesn't make much sense, and not in an awesome post-modern way, my fingers are a little cold, I'm still puzzling about a dream I had last night in which I told my wife that while she was gone on a business trip I'd shovel out the eight inches of sand I'd covered the floor of our library with, which she's been surprisingly obliging about but I was starting to get the impression that enough is enough...

      That's not a very good narrative, and even the most forgiving of Tristram Shandy's critics have admitted that it's not a page-turner. The word is self-indulgent.

      Shandy belongs to the Quixotic tradition - not as in the word, but as in the talking about the Cervantick [sic] influence - and I love that genre. It's writing about writing, and I was hoping to love this book, and I was excited about lots of parts of Shandy. For example: the page following the quote that opens this review is marbled; it was different, then, in every edition of this book as it was originally published. That's weird, and not lamely weird. There's also a part where Sterne threatens to describe the widow Wadman and then just leaves the next page blank, so you can draw her yourself, "as like your mistress as you like - as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you." (VI.38)

      And he leaves IV.24 out because, he says, he realized after writing it that it was so good it would throw the balance of the rest of the book off; it would make everything else seem worse by comparison. Again, that's a funny joke. But I found myself a little disappointed by IV.25, because unlike 24, it existed. And when one finds oneself wishing that all of the chapters of a book had been excluded, one has to admit that one may not be enjoying reading it.

      Tristram Shandy is a clever book. It might even be a worthwhile book, if you're really interested in books. But it's a bitch to read.
    • 4/5
      I've wrestled with what to write about Tristram Shandy since I finished it. It isn't a book you can sum up very well, and the most entertaining bits of it are best found on your own, I think.So I'll just say this: it's not as hard to read as you might think. The language takes some getting used to, and I read it at a pace of 20-30 pages a day. But you do acclimate to it and get into a rhythm. And yes, it's full of digressions and stories within stories and soliloquies about battles and fortifications, but it's also full of moments that make you go "wait, what did he just say?!" and make you re-evaluate what you thought you knew about propriety in the 18th century.Recommended for: anyone who's up for a bit of a challenge, people who are okay with the absurd.Quote: "But my father's mind took unfortunately a wrong turn in the investigation; running, like the hypercritic's, altogether upon the ringing of the bell and the rap upon the door, -- measuring their distance, and keeping his mind so intent upon the operation, as to have power to think of nothing else, -- commonplace infirmity of the greatest mathematicians! working with might and main at the demonstration and so wasting all their strength upon it, that they have none left in them to draw the corollary, to do good with."
    • 5/5
      It took me almost a year longer than I originally planned, but I've finished The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. I loved it. I've seldom had so much fun with classic literature. And I'm pleased to say that Mr. Sterne saved his best for last. The final two books, probably the most popular sections in the novel, concern Uncle Toby's romance with the Widow Wadman who lives as tenant-for-life nextdoor to the Shandy estate. Mrs. Wadman has spent the length of the novel watching the growth of Toby's large scale model of the Battle of Namur where he recieved his groin wound. Over time, she has become attracted to Toby, both the the man and to the estate he shares with his brother. Tristram, our narrator, speculates that she may still want children as she is still young; the reader soon understands that whether she wants children or not, she clearly wants both romance and sex.One day she overhears Toby and his man-servant Trim discussing which is more painful, a knee injury or a groin injury. Afterwards, she is understandly interested in the extent of Uncle Toby's wound. She meets with him in the scenes that follow and finds Tody is happy to discuss his wound and more than willing so show her exactly where he was wounded. He takes her to the large scale model of the Battle of Namur, breaks out his measuring equiptment and pinpoints the exact location where he was standing when the bullet struck his groin. Widow Wadman is understandably frustrated. The end of the novel threw me for something of a loop. Sir Tristram is exponding on a grand point of philosophy to his brother Toby, Yorick and Dr. Slop, as is his wont, when Obediah comes rushing in to complain about Sir Tristram's bull. Sir Tristram's old bull was supposed to sire a calf for Obediah's cow, but the time has come and the cow has not calved, so suspicion has fallen on the bull. It can't be the bull's fault, swears Sir Tristram, becuase he goes about his business with grave expression thereby proving his capability. It's must be the bull's fault, says Dr. Slop for the cow was hairy at the time and therefore in heat. What's this story all about, asks Mrs. Shandy. "A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick--And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard."I had to look it up. A cock and bull story is a wildly fanciful tale that strays from subject to subject. The phrase may have come from Stony Stratford, England where there used to be two rival inns, The Cock and The Bull. At each inn, people would gather and tell boastful tales that often made fun of those who frequented the rival inn. That in the novel's final line Mr. Sterne dismisses the entire preceeding 526 pages as so much nonsense seems fitting to me. That he does so in a way that references breeding, Toby's war wound, and all that stuff about the importance of big noses from earlier in the book is just a little bit brilliant. A book like Tristram Shandy can't really have a proper ending; it simply has to stop. As it is, it's a very good stop.