A modest question: since Stephanie Zacharek's review deals in large part with the relationship between a movie and the book it is based on, wouldn't it be reasonable to actually read the book? Did Ms Z take a version of the Larry King pledge?

If Tristram Shandy were some 5 pound Victorian snorer about vicars and spinsters it would be one thing, but the book, besides being exceedingly funny and surprisingly indecent, is famously self-referential so that a movie about it that takes the form of a movie within a movie within a movie makes a lot of sense. Having actually read the book--honest, it wasn't a horrible chore--I look forward to seeing the movie.

I was nuts for 18th century fiction in college. Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne--though I confess Richardson was too serious for me. For years I felt like a cult member seeking others, and, say, finding out a new friend loved Humphrey Clinker was like reaching an oasis in the cultural/social desert. I've gone far afield within those authors: Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, et al. But Tristram Shandy is still a favorite and I've read it twice. His digressions circle around but he always gets to his strory, such as it is, sooner or later. Be assured! It's witty, deeply experimental (Jonathan Safran Foer rips off some of its devices, assuming correctly nobody's read the book), and a whole universe in itself, the way best fiction is. I found Sterne's humor very inspiring as my own writing career set off soon after college and enjoyed returning to him.

It really sounds as if the movie is less an adaptation than an extended riff on the same ideas, using the book as a motif and backdrop but little else.

Which is, in this case, only appropos. After all, there really isn't much IN the book to adapt, in the usual sense of the word.

On a side note, I once bought the much-maligned "Great Books" series because it was the cheapest way at the time to actually acquire a lot of the books I wanted hardback copies of. When they updated it to drop Sterne and pick up some Austen, I somehow managed to get the update for free...and dutifully inserted Sterne's book where it should have remained. He's that good, and that important. And most importantly, he's not Richardson.

Some people think that if famous 19th century novels are stuffy and boring, then 18th century novels must be even worse. Wrong. "Tristram Shandy" is laugh-out-loud funny and very bawdy in places. (Check out the first chapter, which describes Tristram's conception.) Most of the book meanders around the conversations and obsessions of his father and uncle; as I recall little Tristram isn't even born until around page 400. The scene where the uncle tells the widow about his war wound is hysterical -- I'm glad to hear it's in the movie.

Right now I'm halfway through my second reading, and my only complaint is that I just know I'm still not getting half the jokes.

The ending seen in American theaters, in which Lizzy and Darcy actually kiss, was the last straw; in Austen's world, characters never kissed, even, apparently, in private.

As a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, I'd like to pass on two things: one, many of our members actually did like the film (I am not among them, but have spoken to quite a few); two, those who objected to the final scene of the film objected not to the kiss but to the dreadful dialogue that accompanied it. I saw a draft of the script that had a similar scene but used dialogue from the denouement of the novel. I wonder why those involved felt it needed to be "improved?"

First, lover of the classics (hateful word, ain't it?) though I am, I'm not given to tut-tutting interpretational freedom. I haven't seen Tristram, so I can't comment on the movie version, but I have seen the most recent Pride and Prejudice and loved it. Whoever said that the late 18th century was stuffy, anyway?

As for the book Tristram, which I've both read and taught, one of Sterne's major concerns seems to be the intertextuality of life, so to speak. Even the moment of climax at which Tristram is begotten (misbegotten?) needs to be contextualized because, after all, the spirit of the child is defined by the spirit in which he's gotten . . . and that in turn depends on the history of father, mother, neighbors, etc, etc, etc.

At any rate, the idea of intertextuality surely can be presented in a film as well as in a book. Assuming the movie is well conceived and well made, folks will be disappointed only if they expect the film to be the book.