Thursday, February 10, 2005

A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne

As Mr Burns in the Simpsons said when picking out a potential present - Too Cutesy Poo!!

The first page of this novel didn't grab me. So I kept on going hoping that something soon would. Didn't happen. Thankfully, it's only 118 pages long.

Sterne calls the main character Yorrick, as in Shakespear's Yorrick. Then he has a character called La Fleur, based on Cervantes' Sancho Panza. Talk about more front than Myers!

Even the introduction was unbelievably dull.

Apparenly Virginia Woolf was a big fan of Sterne. I can perhaps see why she would go for this type of fey, whimsical humour.

Myself, I tend to agree with Camille Paglia, who described Sterne's other book, Tristram Shandy, as 'utterly unfunny'.

Stick with Samuel Richardson's mindboggling Clarissa is my advice.

A bummer.

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