I know someone who claims to love this book. That is such a grandiose assertion over the merely unbelievable “I have read it” that I can only choose to accept its truth. However, he is English and therefore may be making some kind of joke.
I have read it, in the sense that I have turned 615 pages and processed the meaning of most of the words on each of them. The novel is so rambling and digressive that it’s hard to say I really read it. My final evaluation is that it’s a work best appreciated from a distance, like the distance between yourself and your television playing Michael Winterbottom’s movie. I didn’t love the book, but I loved the idea of it.
Let me reiterate the same talking points that are parroted by the characters in the film: it’s a meta-novel before there were novels to be meta about; it hardly gets around to getting started much less being finished; it’s got weird typographic stuff all over the place. All of that, and a lot more besides, is really great. It was just a total slog.
When I’m reading these books I tag passages that I think I will want to write about later. Re-reading them now, they are almost all dirty.
I define a nose as follows, —- intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition. —- For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs, — I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.
“My sister, I dare say”, added he, “does not care to let a man come so near her ****”. I will not say whether my uncle Toby had compleated the sentence or not ; —— ’tis for his advantage to suppose he had, —- as, I think, he could have added no ONE WORD which would have improved it.”
Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.
I haven’t quoted any passages from the part about the hot chestnut in the guy’s pants, but it’s here if you want to do the honors yourself.
I also tagged all the famous metafictional bits: the black pages, the empty page for the reader to draw in their own portrait of the Widow Wadman, a missing chapter (including a jump in page numbers; in the original printing this resulted in the right-hand pages becoming even-numbered, although my Penguin edition resumed the numbering in the usual way).
But between all this there is a lot of book to get through, and that is what tends to bog down modern readers. I feel good about having read it, and even though the movie is about how no one knows the book, it’s extra-funny if you have. I recommend it the way I recommend dropping a hot chestnut down your pants: titillating at first, sometimes quite painful, but you can blog about it afterwards.
Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?
On the other hand, I actually finished Tristram Shandy, which is more than I can say for The Mezzanine.