Voyage Around My Room [Paperback]

In 1790, while serving in the Piedmontese army, the French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre (17631852) was punished for dueling and placed under house arrest for forty-two days. The result was a discursive, mischievous memoirDe Maistre pioneered a mode of travel that was to make his name: room travel. Dressed in pink-and-blue pajamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.The late eighteenth century is when modernity (more exactly, the modernities) began. Sterne, Diderot, Rousseauamong the effortlessly brilliant writers of that incandescent era, there still remains Xavier de Maistre to discover or rediscover. His masterpiece,Funny and deceptively profound.