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English
New York Review Books
30 January 2018
Available in an unabridged English translation for the first time in more than a century, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave is an epic autobiography of Chateaubriand, the aristocratic Frenchman who lived through the beginning of the French Revolution and who would become the founder of the Romantic movement in Europe.

Written over the course of four decades, Fran ois-Renede Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn theadmiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, andSebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs,spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looksback on the already bygone world of his youth. Herecounts the history of his aristocratic family and the firstrumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playinggames on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in thewoods near his father's castle in Combourg, hunting withKing Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first headscarried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meetingwith George Washington in Philadelphia, and fallinghopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlottein the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume endswith Chateaubriand's return to France after seven yearsof exile in England.

In this new edition (the first unabridged Englishtranslation of any portion of the Memoirs to be publishedin more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as awriter of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotistwhose meditations on the meaning of history, memory,and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsyand memorable gloom.
By:   , ,
Imprint:   New York Review Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Edition:   Main
Dimensions:   Height: 204mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 32mm
Weight:   560g
ISBN:   9781681371290
ISBN 10:   1681371294
Pages:   512
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Franpois-RenU de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), a writer, historian, and diplomat, is considered one of France's first Romantic authors.Alex Andriesse is a writer and translator. He lives in Dublin, Ireland, and western Massachusetts.Anka Muhlstein was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1996 for her biography of Astolphe de Custine, and has twice received the History Prize of the French Academy.

Reviews for Memoirs From Beyond The Grave

To read Chateaubriand is to witness the subjective and yet comprehensive unfolding of a society's change: of customs, prospects, ethics, conventions. He stands (as in the famous portrait by Girodet) on the farther shore. --Alberto Manguel <p/> The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave [...] encapsulate and bring to perfect mastery all the linguistic registers that their author had by turns attempted: epic, tragic, elegiac, lyric, oratorical, narrative, descriptive - like an evening rainbow over a Venetian lagoon. -Marc Fumaroli <p/> Chateaubriand's Memoirs, with all their myth makingmythmaking, posing, and dark glamour, are his Arc de Triomphe, and may yet prove more lasting than their equivalent in stone. --Adam Kirsch <p/> A Romantic classic. --BBC News, Paris <p/> Chateaubriand's... Memoires d'outre-tombe, his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, is at once sublime literature, brilliant history seen by a fiercely intelligent eye-witness, and a self-portrait of a remarkable and complex man. Chateaubriand is one of that worldly, intellectually -restless literary set, including Goethe and Byron, who may be said to have founded and developed the wider European Romantic movement, granting it social relevance and gaining it an extensive European and North American audience. --A. S. Kline


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