The "greatest of all novels"? No, Virginia Woolf. It is just a jumble of stuff. I didn't get it, but I watched the movie and all the special features that explained it. It is not a favorite, but I can cross it off my very long list (that I am seriously considering abandoning because we are scrapping the bottom of the barrel these days - I think I have already read the TRUE classics that most lists have). I am not sure why Mustich includes some of them, but...here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
This antic shaggy dog story firmly established itself during the twentieth century as one of the most admired books ever written. Virginia Woolf, for example, hailed it as “the greatest of all novels,” and Czech writer Milan Kundera praised it for reaching “heights of playfulness, of lightness, never scaled before or since.” Tristram Shandy’s levity is irrepressibly apparent even before you start reading: Flip through the book and you’ll see black pages, marbled pages, blank pages, and typographic oddities that, you’ll discover, are visual counterparts to specific moments in the story. In large part that story turns out to be about the protagonist’s difficulty telling it. As digression follows digression, and interruption interrupts interruption, Tristram leads the tale on such a merry dance that it proceeds in every direction but forward. His reflections on matters mundane and philosophical and his accounts of the lives of his father and of his eccentric and often incomprehensible uncle Toby are just a few of the detours that distract him from his own progress, which never gets much past his first three years. But this wayward narrative’s energy never flags, and Laurence Sterne’s self-reflexive novel offers one of literature’s first—and probably its funniest—portrayals of the errant urgencies of consciousness.
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