A Sentimental Journey

De: Laurence Sterne

Narrado por: Anton Lesser

Published just months before his death in 1768, A Sentimental Journey is Sterne's lightly fictionalised account of his own European travels. And being Sterne, it is more about digressions, misunderstandings, and risqué jokes than the places he visits. Narrated by the (apparently) innocent Parson Yorick, who appeared in Sterne's other masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, it is full of anecdote and incident, and is far more about the people than the landscapes on the road from Calais. Despite the title, any sentimentality is offset by the elegance of the writing, the engaging companionship of Yorick himself, and the constant, playful surprises.

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2010 Naxos Audiobooks

Glad I Listened, But…

…I know the significance of this novel to the history of literature and writers.

But it wasn’t much to the journey.

I did my best to hold up a reasonable level of interest. But I can’t say I altogether succeeded.

The plot may have been a precursor to modern ways of writing and exemplary technically. But, perhaps because I have not have not studied Sterne academically, I found little of value in the reading.

I am a reasonably bright person who has read a great deal. And I feel solid in pointing out as well that character development was stunted as well.

I can’t be too positive except to say if you have interest to go ahead as a student of literature, do so. But, as I reader and lover of all kinds of fiction, I can’t give it high marks.

Read for Coursework - Fantastic Audiobook

Narrator made the story so much more enjoyable. Glad I checked Audible. -graduate student

Another Hoot...

...from the peculiar mind of Laurence Sterne and brilliantly realized, again, by a voice genius who makes Sterne accessible to the bewildered masses: Anton Lesser, better known to many as GoT's Qyburn, the unethical former maester, notable for his illegal experimentations involving humans both live and dead. Sterne is a hard read, even in this short work, a result of his virtual stream-of-consciousness into layers and layers of digressions and caesuras within digressions and caesuras that sometimes reach an end or conclusion...or not, drifting away the the vault of incomplete digressions.

I recommend having the book in hand as you listen to the narration, which Lesser seems to have carefully thought out, for the sake of clarity and appropriate emphasis, parsing Sterne's diction to a "t." It seems to me impossible that listeners might continue to track the ceaseless Sternian digressions competently while Sterne drags his narrative down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, emerging or not, somewhat later.

Laurence Sterne anticipates modernists Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien...Irishmen all...and is himself a modern absurdist - a point made clear in a useful Penguin Classics introduction by A. Alvarez - in Georgian raiment as well as a trail marker in English-language literature. With Lesser as helper, confusion yields to illumination and allows readers to savor this quirky semi-autobiogrqphical novel.