A fellow of infinite jest

Monty Python’s Flying Circus once held an All-England Summarise Proust Competition in which the finalists were required to summarise A la recherche du Temps Perdu, once in swimsuit and once in evening dress. The Bolton Choral Society competed in song:  “Proust in his first book wrote about, wrote about, Proust in his first book wrote about, wrote about, Proust in…” and their allotted fifteen seconds was up. 

The burden of summarisingThe Life and Opinions of the Tristram Shandy, Gentleman feels only slightly less foolhardy. It’s hard to know where to begin, or end. The contributor to the Oxford Companion to English Literature hacked a summary only to give up in exasperation “in spite of the title, the book gives us very little of the life and nothing of the opinions of the nominal hero”. I will attempt to summarise this nine volume novel in a number of ways.