Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy cover art

Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

By: Michela Bertazzo
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After the bizarre textual antics of "Tristram Shandy", this book would seem to require a literary health warning. Sure enough, it opens in mid-conversation upon a subject never explained; meanders after a fashion through a hundred pages, then fizzles out in mid-sentence - so, a plotless novel lacking a beginning, a middle or an end. Let us say: an exercise in the infinitely comic.

"There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand, and to be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words."

Sterne calls his fine sensitivity to body language (as we now term it) "translation". Much of the pleasure to be had from this wonderfully engaging book comes from his unmatched ability to extract random details from the chaos of experience to create comic turns imbued with Feeling. His Parson Yorick is the Sentimental Traveller: certainly a Man of Feeling, but one in whom "Nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece..." (Summary by Martin Geeson)Copyright Michela Bertazzo Art
Episodes
  • 22 - "The man who either disdains..."

    22 - "The man who either disdains..."
    Mar 27 2026
    18 mins
  • 25 - "When you have gained the top..."

    25 - "When you have gained the top..."
    Mar 27 2026
    16 mins
  • 24 - "There was nothing from which..."

    24 - "There was nothing from which..."
    Mar 27 2026
    11 mins
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