A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford
In the mid-1940s, Sybille Bedford set off from Grand Central Station for Mexico, accompanied by her friend E., a hamper of food and drink (Virginia ham, cherries, watercress, a flute of bread, Portuguese ros ), books, a writing board, and paper. Her resulting travelogue captures the violent beauty of the country she visited. Bedford doesn't so much describe Mexico as take the reader there--in second-class motor buses over thousands of miles, through arid noons and frigid nights, successions of comida corrida, botched excursions to the coast, conversations recorded verbatim, hilarious observations, and fascinating digressions into murky histories. At the heart of the book is the Don Otavio of the title, the travelers' gracious host, his garrulous family and friends, and his Edenic hacienda at Lake Chapala. Published in 1953, A Visit to Don Otavio was an immediate success, a travel book written by a novelist, as Bedford described it, establishing her reputation as a nonpareil writer.
Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) was born Sybille von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany, to an aristocratic German father and a partly Jewish, Hamburg-born mother. Raised variously in Germany, Italy, France, and England, she lived with her mother and Italian stepfather after her father's death when she was seven, and was educated privately. Encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Bedford began writing fiction at the age of sixteen and went on to publish four novels, all influenced by her itinerant childhood among the European aristocracy: A Legacy, Jigsaw (short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize), and A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error. She married Walter Bedford in 1935 and lived briefly in America during World War II, before returning to England. She was a prolific travel writer, the author of a two volume biography of her friend Huxley, and a legal journalist, covering nearly one hundred trials. In 1981 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire. Daniel Mendelsohn was born in 1960 and studied classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. His books include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace; and two collections of critical essays, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, published by New York Review Books. He teaches literature at Bard College.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780907871057 |
| ISBN 10 | 0907871054 |
| Title | A Visit to Don Otavio |
| Author | Sybille Bedford |
| Series | Travel Literature |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Eland Publishing Ltd |
| Year published | 1982-06-21 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |