The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1784)

Boring and after the spankings I couldn't bear to read anymore. ( )

The jacket explains that this book was revolutionary when it was published, but it didn't move me at all. I found him a bit of a whinger, somewhat unsympathetic and naieve. The opening section was interesting, exploring how his character had been shaped by experiences when young, but it fell awfuly flat in the middle and turned into a recitation of ills towards the end. ( )

ebook version

It was radical at the time. It isn’t now. Now we can hardly stop public figures from stripping naked before us with autobiographies that are designed to shock and titillate. But when Rousseau wrote this he was doing something that hadn’t been done before: writing the truth about his youth.

This book’s one of those “important” books that anyone serious about literature can bore the backside off a bus with, one of those that makes you think the publishers of the 1001 series should have changed their “Must” to “Should.”

So, I didn’t really enjoy this a great deal but I did appreciate what he was trying to do. I was disappointed to read that it wasn’t published until after he’d died. That kind of defeats the object of a confession to me, particularly for those like the falsely accused servant girl who undoubtedly suffered for his own theft and wasn’t socially positioned to profit from selling the story as Rousseau did. Vive la Revolution! ( )

Read this in English Penguin edition when I was in my 20s and now in my late 40s I would like to go back and read it in the French original. At the time of the first reading, I had really very little idea of the milieu in which it was written. Now I have a bit deeper perspective on this period. It will probably make a lot more sense now.
Along with St. Augustine, Rousseau was promoted to me as one of the pioneers of the genre of autobiography, warts and all, as another reviewer of this book has put it.
Perhaps a third individual could be added, and maybe should be added, to this group: Benvenuto Cellini. I also have that book and have started but not finished it yet. When that is all done, maybe I could compare all three together.