Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Bedford's autobiographical novel paints a vivid picture of life in 1920s Europe between the wars. From her first novel, A Legacy--a book admired by novelists (among them Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford), critics, and readers on both sides of the Atlantic--to her acclaimed life of Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford's writings have given great delight. And all the wit, feeling, and elegance of perception her readers have come to expect are brilliantly present in this, her first book in fifteen years. She moves now in the borderland between fiction and biography to tell the story of a young woman who will one day be a writer, growing up in the 1920s in a world at one moment bright with grace and pleasure, at the next bewildering and dark--and of the lives that touch and color hers. It is the story of an unsentimental education that begins in the Grand Duchy of Baden, in a small chateau increasingly threadbare after the Great War. Here the narrator's father, who was himself raised not exactly to money but to the sweetness of life, instructs the solitary child (her mother absent, having taken a lover) in decorums already vanishing. It is an education suddenly deflected to the dazzling Italian countryside, to the company of the clever, beautiful, and seductive mother who is the lodestar of the narrator's young life, by turns embracing her daughter, banishing her to England and the generosity of others, and calling her back--now no longer to Italy but to Sanary, on the Mediterranean coast of France, where the painter Kisling and his wife, and the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria, are among those who capture the girl's imagination and her heart. Finally we see her--since earliest childhood precociously in charge of herself--as she approaches her twenty-first year, making her way through a society of worldly intelligence whose emotional agenda is far less simple than it seems. In Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford has movingly conveyed an apprenticeship to life, and to a life's work.Sybille Bedford was born in the German city of Charlottenburg in 1911 and raised in Italy, England, and France. Her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, was released in 1953, and she has since authored eight more, including Jigsaw, A Legacy, A Favourite of the Gods, and A Compass Error, as well as famous chronicles of criminal trials and other judicial events, and an acclaimed biography of her mentor Aldous Huxley. She was the vice president of English PEN and one of the nine Companions of Literature in the United Kingdom. Bedford died in February 2006 in London, where she had lived for many years.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781582431437 |
| ISBN 10 | 1582431434 |
| Title | Jigsaw |
| Author | Sybille Bedford |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Counterpoint |
| Year published | 2001-04-12 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |