Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800

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.