43 Followers
As novels go, Sterne's book is one of the most outstanding I ever 'met' so far. Its main characteristic is that it doesn't get anywhere and is, mostly, a series of wild-running digressions posing as a fictitious autobiography. It is annoying and frustrating, and absolutely hilarious, to wrestle with this. This graphic novel fully lives up to the wild goose chase the original is. As often is the case with pictures, they manage to tell pages of ramblings in one or two frames which is why the reproductions is astoundingly complete. You have Tristram Shandy, the narrative voice, scrambling in and out of the frames of the anecdotes, dragging along a group of hypothetical readers who are being monologued at in the same way as in the novel - only they have to endure physically what is only imaginary in the original novel. And the authors of the graphic novel actually added another layer because here there is 'the author (of the graphic novel) and his dog' also following Tristram Shandy, offering literary criticism and comments on the reception history and interpretations. This may sound 'educational', but never is because author and dog suffer just as much from having to run after Tristran Shandy as the hypothetical readers. The style of drawings is a bit raw and vulgarly explicit in a way that fits Sterne's novel from the 18th century surprisingly well. This, I think, could be a great first contact opportunity with Tristram Shandy.
Nov 8, 2022
As novels go, Sterne's book is one of the most outstanding I ever 'met' so far. Its main characteristic is that it doesn't get anywhere and is, mostly, a series of wild-running digressions posing as a fictitious autobiography. It is annoying and frustrating, and absolutely hilarious, to wrestle with this. This graphic novel fully lives up to the wild goose chase the original is. As often is the case with pictures, they manage to tell pages of ramblings in one or two frames which is why the reproductions is astoundingly complete. You have Tristram Shandy, the narrative voice, scrambling in and out of the frames of the anecdotes, dragging along a group of hypothetical readers who are being monologued at in the same way as in the novel - only they have to endure physically what is only imaginary in the original novel. And the authors of the graphic novel actually added another layer because here there is 'the author (of the graphic novel) and his dog' also following Tristram Shandy, offering literary criticism and comments on the reception history and interpretations. This may sound 'educational', but never is because author and dog suffer just as much from having to run after Tristran Shandy as the hypothetical readers. The style of drawings is a bit raw and vulgarly explicit in a way that fits Sterne's novel from the 18th century surprisingly well. This, I think, could be a great first contact opportunity with Tristram Shandy.
Nov 8, 2022
