A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford

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 rosé), 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 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	9781590179697
ISBN 10	1590179692
Title	A Visit to Don Otavio
Author	Sybille Bedford
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2016-06-21
Number of pages	392
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.