Indeed, it is the lyricism and intimacy of his language, convincingly translated here by Alex Andriesse, that made Chateaubriand a precursor of French Romanticism.' -Alan Riding, The New York Times Book Review 'Alex Andriesse's fine unabridged translation-which deftly wrangles Chateaubriand's personal canon of Greek and Latin classics, Breton proverbs, Jewish scripture, Catholic hymns and medieval laid-is the first into English in more than a century.

is less its historical overview of the turbulence that preceded Napoleon's rise to power than Chateaubriand's examination of his own character and feelings amid multiple setbacks. 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. Mmoires 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'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 'A Romantic classic.' -BBC News, Paris 'Chateaubriand's. 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. The volume endswith Chateaubriand's return to France after seven yearsof exile in England. 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. Herecounts the history of his aristocratic family and the firstrumblings of the French Revolution.

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. Written over the course of four decades, Fran ois-Renede Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn theadmiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, andSebald.

Memoirs from beyond the grave 1768 1800