The Memory Chalet
  • Published: 1 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099555599
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $39.99

The Memory Chalet

Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond
Find local retailers

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. 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.
  • Published: 1 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099555599
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Tony Judt

Date: 2005-02-17
Professor Tony Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the US. His books include Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August, 2010 at the age of 62.

At the time of his death, Tony Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2009 Judt was awarded a Special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British Political writing. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) was a runner up for the 2006 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Also by Tony Judt

Ill Fares The Land
Thinking the Twentieth Century
When the Facts Change
Reappraisals
Postwar
See all

Praise for The Memory Chalet

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

Witty, profound, controversial... Wonderfully written... A wellspring of enlightenment you need to spend time with

Peter Preston, 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 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

The brilliant historian Tony Judt's posthumously published biographical essays, The Memory Chalet show 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