The Life of Henry Brulard (New York Review Books Classics)

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. The Barnes & Noble Review Henri Beyle (1783-1842), better known under his pen name Stendhal, is the author of two of the greatest works of European fiction, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma . The first is probably, after Flaubert s Madame Bovary, the most widely read French novel of the 19th century. It traces the rise and fall of an ambitious young provincial named Julien Sorel, focusing largely on his love affair with the married Madame de Renal and his infatuation with the romantic Mathilde de la Mole. The second book concentrates on politics in a small city-state of post-Napoleonic Italy. In the hands of Stendhal, the manipulations and entanglements of Count Mosca, Fabrice del Dongo, and the Duchess de Sanseverina can, by turns, seem as sparkling as a Rossini opera or as dark as one by Verdi. When André Gide was asked to select his ten favorite French novels, The Charterhouse of Parma was his clear first choice. Nearly every male reader falls in love with the formidable "La Sanseverina." I certainly did. Stendhal's unfinished autobiography tells of his troubled boyhood and rebellious youth in Grenoble, offers a glimpse of his philosophy of self-knowledge, and includes the author's playful sketches and diagrams