A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

5 Responses to “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy”

1. Anonymous says:

   August 17, 2010 at 7:24 pm

   Like Sterne’s additional works, _A Sentimental Journey_ is extraordinarily playful. His works are the eighteenth century’s postmodernist works of play. They have lots of textual puzzles and tend toward the absurd. For example, the Mr. Yorick of the _Journey_ is also a character in Sterne’s major novel _Tristram Shandy_ and is also the name under which he publishes his own sermons (he was a clergyman). The text is very “fragmentary” and the novel even jokes about that itself, marking parts of itself “fragment.” In these ways, the _Journey_ is fun and modern.

   But it is also indicative of an vital eighteenth-century trend–sensibility or sentimentalism. All eras have their debates about the relationshp between the individual and society and this is one eighteenth-century answer. This opinion has nothing to do with “rights” but everything to do with “sympathy.” Mr. Yorick, the “sentimental traveller,” relates to additional human beings through sympathetic physical responses, most notably the “pulses” and “beats” of his heart and hands for various women.

   Therefore, this book is a excellent way to get into a very different past mindset while at the same time seeing the roots of some of the literary forms of today.
   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
2. Anonymous says:

   August 17, 2010 at 9:14 pm

   Even for modern readers, “A Sentimental Journey” (published 1768)is as incredibly innovative as Sterne’s celebrated “Tristram Shandy”. Sterne’s ability to fall into place the minute details of experience – which may be down to a few seconds only – is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”. Indeed, Woolf admired this book.

   This is by no means an simple read. The 18th-century prose is hard; the book is larded with Frenchisms and Biblical or classical allusions; the complex, slow narrative regularly requires re-reading. But the rewards are fantastic! It’s wise, deeply comical, and incredibly perceptive.

   There are several helpful reviews not more than dealing with the aspect of “corniness”, and so I will just single out two things which appealed to me:

   1. STERNE AND BODY LANGUAGE. Sterne shows an nearly 20th-century appreciation of body language. In fact, I judge he might have been the first to identify it as such. His chapter, “The Translation”, highlights the importance of being able to interpret devious physical hints, like a language: “There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this _shorthand_, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into unadorned words.” How visionary!

   2. STERNE AND THE FRENCH. Ever since Shakespeare inserted a scene in “cod French” into _Henry V_, really ever since the Norman Conquest and up to Monty Python and beyond, the English have revelled in mocking the French and their language. His Continental travelling gives Sterne the perfect excuse to do this. At one point he differentiates between “tant pis” (= “never mind” – where there is nothing to be gained) and “tant mieux” (= so much the better – where there IS an advantage). He also has a hilarious section on the grades of French swearing: first “Diable!”, then “Peste!” and finally the words that he won’t repeat. In all cases, Sterne carefully shows the social niceties of these expressions.

   The protagonist, Yorick, has various adventures of lust and feeling with women and additional typically travelish things like losing his passport that we can all tell to. He’s tender, obscene, learned, amusing, companionable, and above all, readable – if tough.

   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
3. Anonymous says:

   August 17, 2010 at 10:23 pm

   A Sentimental Journey is a fabulous book for so many reasons. Laurence Sterne was an immensely influential writer in the 18th century–his major works, Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy, were responses to the travel narrative and newly born novel, respectively. His writing is essential to scholars of the 18th century–he is referenced in Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Foster’s The Coquette and Tyler’s The Contrast. To know and appreciate his novel is to have a better appreciation and like of the works that built their structures on his foundation. And yet it is original, as Yorick says himself, “both my travels and observations will be altogether of a different cast from any of my fore-runners.”

   Yet it is not only for past benefit that one should read Sentimental Journey. The adventures and amours of Sterne’s semi-autobiographical Yorick are delightful. One of the most romantic passages I’ve read in a book occurs when Yorick inadvertantly takes the hand of a woman and describes in detail the thrill of merely holding it. Granted, hers is not the only hand he will hold, but he writes so wonderfully, candidly and engagingly that it is extremely hard to hold his passions against the sentimental Yorick. His scene with the starling locked in a cage is pertinent and a touching commentary on slavery. What a guy! My only complaint is the editor of this edition does not feel it necessary to translate the French-of which there is plenty-building some passages hard to know at best. But,this is a sentimental journey that I will gladly take over and over.
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
4. Anonymous says:

   August 18, 2010 at 1:05 am

   Sterne befuddles and delights readers and critics alike in A Sentimental Journey. He takes the fashionable travel log of the time and satarizes it. Contemporary critics had a fit over its supposedly bawdy scenery, yet some modern readers may over look its sublte innuendo. The form of the novel is reasonably unlike anything that had preceeded it, thus is vital for any scholars. Most importanly, but, the book is amusing and fun to read.
   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
5. Anonymous says:

   August 18, 2010 at 1:06 am

   This autobiographical acount by Sterne of his amorous progress through France and Northern Italy is surely one of the most delightful books ever written. Composed as he lay dying of tuberculosis, the book nonetheless encaptures the leader’s renowned zest for life as well as the libertine spirit of the age in which he lived. The journey down through France to Northern Italy is the perfect vehicle for an excursion into the scenery of human sensibility, and from the moment that this cultured Anglo-Irish cleric sets foot in Calais, the reader is treated to a seies of exquisite encounters with the fairer sex. Rarely has an leader transmitted so well his understanding of the psychological complexity of women, or the pleasure he takes in their company. Engaging, perceptive and witty, this is a book whiich cannot fail to place an imprint on the imagination.
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5