Sterne’s unfinished travelogue has a quixotic flavour. The narrator, Yorick, a Shakespearian name which comes to his rescue when he seeks to obtain a passport in France, is a whimsical character, more interested in the flora and fauna of the France he travels though than the politics or the architecture. The book recounts several would-be romantic engagements that never lead anywhere, with the intricacies of inter-gender entanglements in France, as opposed to Britain, put under the microscope. He travels in the company of Fleur, his would-be Sancho Panza, who also finds himself caught up in the narrator’s romantic shenanigans. The tone of the novel is always light-footed, even jocular, but it is also reminiscent of the the offbeat style of much modern travel writing (aka psychogeography) where the emphasis is on the peculiarities of the journey, the otherwise unnoticeable details, rather than the grander sweep. At one point the narrator suggests that Britain and France are actually at war, (The Seven Years’ War), although you would never have guessed it from anything other than a throwaway remark in the text. What stands out, apart from Sterne’s laconic wit, is perhaps the way in which Yorick rarely seems to feel anything other than comfortable as he moseys from Calais to Paris and then further south. Travelling comes across as a thoroughly relaxed and enjoyable process, which essentially exists to permit the traveller to enjoy small, unthreatening adventures and flirt with the locals of the opposite sex.
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