Memoirs from beyond the grave
Subtitle: 1768-1800
By: François-René de Chateaubriand ; translated from the French by Alex Andriesse ; introduction by Anka Muhlstein
Contributors: Andriesse, Alex, translator
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 550
ISBN-13: 9781681371290
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Contemporaries; History
Work titles: Mémoires d'outre-tombe
Description: "Written over the course of four decades, Francois-René de Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, and W. G. Sebald. In this unabridged section of the Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father's castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand's return to France after eight years of exile in England. In this new translation, Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self-deprecating egoist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom."--
Notes: "The first unabridged English translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century"--Page [4] of cover.

Includes bibliographical references.