Tristram Shandy

Tristram Shandy sits down to write his life story and cannot get himself born. He starts at his own conception, interrupted by a question about winding the clock, and the digressions multiply so productively that the birth does not arrive until the third volume, by which point the reader has toured Uncle Toby's war wounds and model fortifications, Walter Shandy's theories about names and noses, and the sad case of Parson Yorick. The love story between Toby, the gentlest soul in fiction, and the Widow Wadman, who has a pressing question about exactly where he was wounded, is as close as the book comes to a plot, and Sterne makes you wait volumes for it.

There is nothing else like it. Sterne prints a black page in mourning for a character, a marbled page as the emblem of his book, diagrams of his narrative's wanderings, sentences abandoned mid thought, and asterisks over the parts a clergyman could not say. Every trick that would later be called experimental fiction is here, done in 1760, with better jokes. It is bawdy, warm and sentimental by turns, and it demands a reader willing to surrender the destination and enjoy the ride; readers who need the story to advance should be warned honestly that it never really does.

The nine volumes appeared in instalments between 1759 and 1767 and made Sterne, an obscure Yorkshire clergyman, the celebrity of literary London. He autographed later volumes by hand to defeat the forgers, which tells you what success looked like.