The other major Sterne work. And though much shorter, I don't know if I would recommend it to read first. The complexity of this book is not immediately evident (which makes it all the more fantastic for me). I think it gains in greatness with its comparison to Tristram Shandy.

On its own, though, I think it might make an interesting read. It is largely credited for starting the sentimental fiction subgenre - which can be a bit unfair to the book, since sentimental fiction is marked by ridiculous mawkish emotion. But Sentimental Journey rarely falls into such mawkishness. Rather, Sterne does an admirable job at balancing sincere emotion and irony around his rather peculiar travelling preacher Yorick who has decided to take a trip through France and Italy. Sterne is writing in the mode of travel fiction which was all the rage at the time. Sterne's twist, though, is that he focuses on the people of the towns he visits, rather than the places there.

A fascinating aspect of this work is the apology the preacher Yorick gives for the pleasures of the world. He is an endearing human character in love with the world (or, perhaps, the women of the world).

Again, I don't know if I would recommend this without reservation. I think it earns its five stars based on reflection and in its relation to Sterne's other work and its place in eighteenth century literature. All the same, I know many readers would find some incredibly sweet and touching moments in this book.

Nadería sentimental. Vueltas y vueltas para buscar excusas y excusas con las que autoengañarse y maquillar que lo único que persigue en sus vericuetos por Francia es saciar su apetito sexual.

Well.. it truly was a sentimental journey! More interesting than I expected it to be, and the context behind the footnotes/endnotes made it an even more captivating read. It was fun to experience Yorick's dominant narrative voice through his travels!

I got so confused by the end of this book I had to go and check other versions to make sure I had the whole thing, which I did. It was strange and abrupt.

Nice, short travelogue, though rather a journey along the emotional ("sentimental") state of the narrator, of course, with a lot of irony, wit and satire. See the review in my general account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6664367494.

I was a bit hesitant when I started this novel. I had previously tried Sterne’s best-known work, [b:Tristam Shandy|40236755|Tristam Shandy|Laurence Sterne|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1599903901l/40236755._SY75_.jpg|2280279] (published in 1767), and that was a tough job. Satirical, hilarious and ironic, sure, but also pompous and especially verbose due to his constant digressions. I was afraid that this Sentimental Journey would suffer from that as well. But that turned out not to be the case. Not only is this book much shorter (it remained unfinished due to Sterne’s premature death), but the author also stays on point a bit better. Yet once again the ‘compulsive talkativeness’ of the chatterbox Sterne is noticeable; it’s his trademark, so to speak. The picaresque slant (again with explicit references to Rabelais and Cervantes) is also present, including the excessive use of 'double entendre'. But, as I said, this book is more homogeneous.

To be clear: of course this is not really a travelogue as we know it today. Sterne does report on his stay in Calais and Paris, and his departure from there to Northern Italy, but that is only a peg to talk about the amusing things that happen to him, and especially about the feelings this all evokes. This stress on emotions (or presumed emotions) is striking: Sterne highlights his feelings and those of his fellow travelers at every opportunity, so it is not without reason that the title contains the word ‘sentimental’. I read in some reviews that this was intentional, as a resistance to the materialistic-mechanistic vision of Enlightenment philosophers (l’homme machine’). A regularly cited quote at the end of the book, “I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me of the contrary”, even explicitly refers to this. In that sense, this book certainly is also interesting from a historical point of view, i.e. the evolution of ideas and mentality. And what about the reading pleasure? That is certainly there, at least in the strongly ironically charged scenes. But the 18th century vocabulary (really very different from ours) and the sometimes very contrived sentence constructions are a threshold, especially if you want to read this in the original version.

This was another kind of torture