The Life of Henry Brulard

by Stendhal, John Sturrock (Introduction), Lydia Davis (Preface by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780940322899
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	12/28/2001
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	229,428
Product dimensions:	5.03(w) x 8.01(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Stendhal (1783–1842), the pen name of Henri Marie Beyle, was born into a prosperous family in Grenoble. At sixteen he set out for Paris, intending to pursue a career as an engineer, but instead enlisted in Napoleon’s Army. Stendhal took part in campaigns in Italy, Germany, Russia, and Austria, and then, after Napoleon’s fall from power, settled in Milan,where he wrote books on art and music. Expelled from Italy for political reasons in 1821, he returned to Paris; following the 1830 revolution, he secured the position, which he was to hold for the rest of his life, of French Consul to Civitavecchia. Stendhal’s great novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) were largely ignored during his lifetime, and many of his works remained unfinished and were published only posthumously. Among his most important books are On Love, Lucien Leuwen, The Memoirs of an Egotist, and The Life of Henry Brulard.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Introduction	xv
	A Note on the Translation	xxxvii
	Titles	xxxix
	The Life of Henry Brulard	1
Appendix A	Testaments	489
Appendix B	The Priveleges	491

What People are Saying About This

John Sturrock

[Stendhal is] an autobiographer who has no time for the fallen bourgeois world, who despises his compatriots, but who digs deep into himself and his past in order to try and discover why this should be so—to our own vast benefit and pleasure as his future readers.

Editorial Reviews

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.
— Times Literary Supplement

Robert Alter

Stendhal's style is inextricable from his substance- the speed from his passion, the irony from the worldliness.
— New Times Book Review

Daniel Mendelsohn