A Journey Around My Room: Xavier De Maistre (Alma Classics) - Softcover

It was Blaise Pascal who said that all the troubles of humanity came about because of the difficulty men had in simply being happy to sit alone in their rooms; here is the result of such an enforced confinement. And it is wonderful. (...) This edition also includes the 1825 sequel, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, which is just as good, as funny and deceptively profound as its predecessor; and he even makes it to the window-ledge this time. Andrew Brown's translation is excellent too. -- Nicholas Lezard * The Guardian * De Maistre... found the utmost strangeness in himself and the things he had taken for granted. * The Times *

Finding himself locked in his room for six weeks, a young officer journeys around his room in his imagination, using the various objects it contains as inspiration for a delightful parody of contemporary travel-writing and an exercise in Sternean picaresque, and humorously demonstrating what one can explore without having set off to exotic locations. Accompanied in this volume by its equally superb sequel, `Nocturnal Expedition around my Room', in which a similar voyage is made at night several years later, `A Journey around My Room' is a masterly and innovative piece of writing, which was immensely popular in its time and would later influence Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust, among others.