Margaret Heilbrun Recommends Confessions
Margaret Heilbrun -- Library Journal, 12/15/2008 1:56:00 PM
Recommendation: Are you a fan of today’s memoir genre? Go back, avant le deluge of contemporary self-reflection, to the first modern memoir, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, first published in 1782, four years after Rousseau died. These days we question how to establish a memoir as "truth," something that Rousseau felt he had solved back then: truth comes from within oneself. "I know the feelings of my heart," he writes as he takes readers on the journeys, literal and figurative, of his life. There are so many epochal moments, so many encounters Rousseau describes; they both unfold his own complex inner life and summon recognition from us as to the man’s profound impact upon history and literature. When you’re done reading (the anonymous Everyman translation is great), you’ll be primed for Robert Zaretsky’s and John T. Scott’s The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding, coming in March 2009 from Yale University Press and expert at exploring both men accessibly and sensitively.
Ideal Recipient: Those who love memoir, biography, character-driven plots; those who love books that open the past up to them and welcome them in.
Nonbook Tie-in: Did I mention that Rousseau often made a living as a music copyist and even succeeded when he tried his hand at composing? When supporters of Rousseau got his opera Le devin du village ("the Village Soothsayer") played before Louis XV in 1752, Rousseau crept away after the performance rather than meet the King. Louis XV hummed the tunes after he heard the opera. Will you? It’s available in several current recordings.
