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Chateaubriand
hardback with dustjacket, light library marking, very good
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
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June 6, 2015
I'm not sure how this book wound up on my to-read list - I don't really know anything about Chateaubriand and have certainly never read any of his work. It must have been mentioned in a review of some other book as a good biography. It was well written and interesting, but difficult for me because it did assume a certain base of knowledge about revolutionary France and about the authors and other major figures of the time. A fair thing to assume someone reading the book would have, but in my case just not true. Also, he spends some time arguing with other scholars of Chateaubriand about things like his route through America, and since I wasn't familiar with those works, I mostly just wanted to say "it's ok, I believe you, you don't have to justify it to me." This book was only a partial biography - the author planned a three-part work and never completed the second two books. His two-volume biography of Proust is allegedly one of the masterworks of literary biography, and yet this is the one that made it on to my list. Anyway, I enjoyed it but felt like I missed a lot because of my lack of background in the area, and I suspect I wouldn't have moved on to the other volumes even if they existed. I'll just read the wikipedia entry and call my education on Chateaubriand complete.
Displaying 1 of 1 review