The Memory Chalet
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:1st Sep '11
Should be back in stock very soon
A collection of stirring, poignant personal essays from Tony Judt, one of our leading historians.
It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die.
It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck.
In 2008, historian Tony Judt learnt that he was suffering from a disease that would eventually trap his extraordinary mind in a declining and immobile body. At night, sleepless in his motionless state, he revisited the past in an effort to keep himself sane, and his dictated essays form a memoir unlike any you have read before.
Each one charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the sexual politics of Europe, a series of roadtrips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship.
And everything is as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet - a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.
Witty, profound, controversial... Wonderfully written... A wellspring of enlightenment you need to spend time with -- Peter Preston * Observer *
Tony Judt, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet, a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad -- John Banville * Guardian, Books of the Year *
Quintessentail Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest * Financial Times *
The book is simultaneously awe-inspiring and almost too painful to bear... His head, that of a great historian, political writer and charismatic intellectual, was a treasure house -- Diana Athill * Literary Review *
A book to treasure... Witty, profound, contraversial * Observer *
In examining his past, Judt has managed to write what amounts to a Bildungsroman of one of the most distinctive writerly personas of the age. At the same time, he has told us something important about ourselves: about what we were and what we have become -- Jonathan Derbyshire * New Statesman *
The brilliant historian Tony Judt's posthumously published biographical essays, The Memory Chaletshow what a learned, witty, subtle, and above all, civilised man we have lost * Evening Standard, Books of the Year *
A tremendously moving memorial to a first-class historian and essayist, moving from the streets of London in the threadbare Clement Attlee years to the dining rooms of New York in the 21st century. If nothing else, Judt led a compellingly colour life...Some of the most affecting passages in this book look back to Judt's childhood, long before his academic fame and fortune. He writes beautifully about the moral and physical atmosphere of his London boyhood...This book is quintessential Judt: humane, fearless, unsparingly honest. In essay after essay the same qualities shine forth, all the more remarkable given the tragic circumstances...That he finished with such a wonderfully moving book is a mark of the man. * Financial Times *
Judt calls these charming vignettes "feuillotons" which, without being sentimental, gives them the elegiac quality of falling autumn leaves -- James Urquhart * Financial Times *
ISBN: 9780099555599
Dimensions: 198mm x 131mm x 15mm
Weight: 171g
240 pages