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"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."--… (more)
User reviews
This book is notable for Chateaubriand's excursion to America, where he claims to have met George Washington and to have traveled through much of the Eastern part of North America and met lots of traders and Indian tribes. It is all a bit hard to believe (and later readers tend to agree), but it is beautifully written, and North America does serve as the setting for some of Chateaubriand's later novels, so maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt.
The tone throughout is of a man ready to die and content to do so. He takes solace in his religious belief, although he never goes into much depth about it. I think in his case it is necessary to believe that there must be something bigger, something greater, something somehow more human than the pitiless world he portrays in these memoirs.
This is a must read.