[D66] Memoirs from Beyond the Grave

[R.O.]

https://www.nyrb.com/products/memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave?variant=41973006343

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
1768–1800
by François-René de Chateaubriand, translated from the French by Alex 
Andriesse, introduction by Anka Muhlstein

Biography & Memoir
French Literature
International Literature
Literature in English
Paperback


Written over the course of four decades, François-René de 
Chateaubriand’s epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of 
Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald.

Alex Andriesse’s English translation of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from 
Beyond the Grave is a new and complete dazzling rendering of the first 
twelve books of this monumental, legendary, and utterly engrossing 
masterpiece, taking the author from his lonely childhood in Brittany 
through the French Revolution and exile in America to the rise of Napoleon.

Here, 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 seven years of 
exile in England.

In this new edition Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and 
clarity, a self-deprecating egotist whose meditations on the meaning of 
history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy 
and memorable gloom