Yorick, Sterne's Englishman abroad, is blithely unconcerned by famous views or monuments. Bumping along in his coach, the amiable parson buttonholes us with tales of his encounters with all manner of men & women--particularly the attractive ones. As drama piles upon drama, anecdote, flirtation & digression, his destination takes second place to an exhilarating voyage of emotional discovery. Interweaving sharp wit with gaiety, irony with sentiment, Sterne creates a deliberately artless novel which calls to mind the modernism of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce & Samuel Beckett. In A Sentimental Journey, Woolf declared, 'we are as close to life as we can be'.
