Talking About Astral Travel (4)

Here's the fourth and last of the short videos in which I talk about novels with which my own, Astral Travel, has some connection. This time two classics I read when I was young, Tristram Shandy and Wuthering Heights. Both have had a huge influence on my writing in general. Tristram Shandy is particularly interesting for its non-linear structure, which seems postmodern long before postmodernism. To me it's a searingly truthful mode, as it mimics the non-linear way in which we tend to think and remember. Wuthering Heights is notable for its structure - a story filtered by first one narrator and then another to whom she tells the tale, in a way that explores viewpoint and the way that stories are experenced and told. Inevitably, with my literary obsession with the fluidity of time and with contingency, Astral Travel carries the imprint of both.