Scan barcode
A review by marc129
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Graham Petrie, Laurence Sterne
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.
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.