Book Description
French novelist and critic Stendhal witnessed some of the most explosive events of French history -- the revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. He was known as a great wit and liberal in elite circles and enjoyed accolades for his artistic contributions. But his autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, was such a frank, accusing work, chronicling the author's unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town, that it was deemed unpublishable by the day's standards. First published 100 years after Stendhal wrote it, this autobiography has clarity and a burning immediacy.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Unfinished autobiography by Stendhal, which he began writing in November 1835 and abandoned in March 1836. The scribbled manuscript, including the author's sketches and diagrams, was deciphered and published as Vie de Henry Brulard in 1890, 48 years after its author's death. The work is a masterpiece of ironic self-searching and self-creation, in which the memories of childhood are closely interwoven with the liberating joy of writing.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers, Stendhal, author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious honesty and indignation that his book was to remain unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, Stendhal revisits his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and bares his rebellious heart. His adored mother, who died when he was only seven; a father devoted only to his own social ambitions; the aunt whose daily cruelties passed for care: these are among the indelible portraits in a work that captures the sights, sounds, places, and characters of Stendhal's youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with preternatural clarity and immediacy. Full of dazzling images and burning emotions. The Life of Henry Brulard is a vivid memoir that is also an extraordinary work of the imagination.

FROM THE CRITICS

Daniel Mendelsohn - New Times Book Review

Stendhal's style is inextricable from his substance- the speed from his passion, the irony from the worldliness.

Robert Alter - Times Literary Supplement

Stendhal's autobiography, written in 1835 and 1836, and carrying forward the story of his life by fits and starts to his seventeenth year, with fragmentary anticipations of later events, is one of the remarkable nineteenth-century documents of self-exploration. It is also an exemplary instance of the peculiar challenge Stendhal's quicksilver prose presents to the translator, a challenge admirably met by John Sturrock in his lively and faithful English version of La Vie de Henry Brulard.

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