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Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800

1768–1800

by François-René de Chateaubriand, translated from the French by Alex Andriesse, introduction by Anka Muhlstein

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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681371290
Pages: 584
Publication Date:

Praise

As fresh as ever. . . . [Memoirs from Beyond the Grave 1768-1800 and Memoirs from Beyond the Grave 1800-1815] speak as much to our times as they did to the nineteenth century.
—David Platzer, The New Criterion

Chateaubriand’s self-appointed calling was as court historian who held his subject in contempt, ensuring that the truth would out about the monsters who rule the world for a spell. His eloquence won the regard even of his sworn enemy. . . . May he find comparable honor in our time and our place.
—Algis Valiunas, National Review

What distinguishes [Memoirs from Beyond the Grave]...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. 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. What…does Chateaubriand have to offer the contemporary reader? Beyond the sumptuous language and aphoristic compression, it is his ability to engage with, and even surmount, contradiction that proves most resonant. His elastic prose…leaps easily between burnished romanticism and more classical forms…It makes for immensely satisfying reading.
—Dustin Illingworth, TLS

Alex Andriesse has done a wonderful job suggesting the range of tone and feeling Chateaubriand offers, he shifts from the ecstatic to the dry, from the descriptive to the cryptic...The echoes of Chateaubriand in so much existentialist literature of the 20th century suggest that for all his difficulty finding congenial company among his contemporaries, in a longer perspective he becomes a figure we can all be intimate with.
—Tim Parks, London Review of Books

This memoir, ably translated by Andriesse with an introduction from historian Anka Muhlstein, reveals to English-speaking readers the famously aphoristic and flamboyant style that other French writers, including Baudelaire and Proust, admired and sought to emulate.
—Publishers Weekly

The best autobiography ever written...The old viscount could write one hell of a sentence. It’s an incredible book.
—Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

Chateaubriand’s Memoirs...are his Arc de Triomphe, and may yet prove more lasting than their equivalent in stone.
—Adam Kirsch

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

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

A Romantic classic.
—BBC News, Paris

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