A digressive comic novel in which the narrator's attempt to tell his own life story is endlessly derailed by opinions, tangents and mishaps.
Books mentioned in Tristram Shandy (5)
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “…my purpose is to do exact justice to every creature brought upon the stage of this dramatic work,--I could not stifle this distinction in favour of Don Quixote's horse;--in all other points, the parson's horse, I say, was just such another, for he was as lean, and as lank, and as sorry a jade,…”
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais: “the noses of all the men, women, and children, whom _Pantagruel_ found dwelling upon the island of ENNASIN.”
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift: “…a chapter apart--I say, by Posterity--and care not, if I repeat the word again--for what has this book done more than the Legation of Moses, or the Tale of a Tub, that it may not swim down the gutter of Time along with them?”
The Essays by Michel de Montaigne: “prove the very thing which _Montaigne_ dreaded his Essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour-window”
Books that mention Tristram Shandy (20)
Billy Budd by Herman Melville: “I was reading _Tristram Shandy_, and could not go down under the”
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun: “There is a touch of Sterne about the book; not the exaggerated super-Sterne of Tristram Shandy, with eighteenth-century-futurist blanks and marbled pages, but the fluent, casual, follow-your-fancy Sterne of the _Sentimental Journey_.”
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin: “all in vizard masks, which, though worn as well as aunt Dinah's in Tristram Shandy, served to conceal them”
The Elm-Tree on the Mall by Anatole France: “'Don Quixote' or 'Sartor Resartus' or 'Tristram Shandy'”
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: “a seminar on the eighteenth-century novel (Pamela, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy)”
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff: “Quotes its description of "every book and treatise which had ever been wrote upon the subject of great noses" and demands a copy; a Robb-illustrated edition is later sent.”
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A. S. Byatt: “The carpet-seller had written a Ph.D. on Tristram Shandy, and now travelled into Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, bringing back carpets on journeys made by camel, by jeep, into the mountains.”
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: “While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked...”
The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Over the head of the bed were two oak shelves, holding perhaps a dozen books--among which were Theodore, or The Peruvians; Robinson Crusoe; an odd volume of Tristram Shandy; Baxter's Saints' Rest, and a fine English edition of the Arabian Nights, with six hundred wood-cuts by Harvey.”
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett: “She flew to Scotland happy in the (occasionally exasperating) company of Tristram Shandy, and when she got bored with him Trollope (Anthony) was never far away.”
The Common Reader: Second Series by Virginia Woolf: “Tristram Shandy, though it is Sterne's first novel, was written at a time when many have written their twentieth...”
On Literature by Umberto Eco: “cited for its digressive staircase scene spanning three chapters”
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino: Cited as an example of autobiography as exploration of origins, where the narrator dwells on his antecedents
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: “Like poor old Tristram Shandy trying to remember his whole story helter-skelter?”
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea by Emily Wilson: “Lawrence Sterne's rollicking comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy”
I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki: “Since then I have studied noses further, and lately I found a discourse on noses in Tristram Shandy. A pity Kaneda's nose was never shown to Sterne; it would have made fine material. [auto-translated]”
Kusamakura by Natsume Sōseki: “In a book called Tristram Shandy it says that no way of writing is more pleasing to God. He writes the first line by his own power, then simply prays to God and lets the pen move. [auto-translated]”