Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Bedford's autobiographical novel paints a vivid picture of life in 1920s Europe between the wars. Sybille Bedford placed the ambiguous and inescapable stuff of her own life at the center of her fiction, and in Jigsaw, her fourth and final novel, she did it with particular artistry. "What I had in mind," she was later to say, "was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth...Truth here was an artistic, not moral, requirement...It involved...writing about myself, my feelings, my actions." And so she assembled the puzzle pieces of her singular past into a picture of her "unsentimental education." We learn of a childhood spent alone with her father, "a stranded man of the world" living a life of "ungenteel poverty in quite grand surroundings," a ch teau, that is, deep in the German countryside, with wine but little else for him and his young daughter to hold body and soul together. We learn of her return to Italy and her mother, "the one
character I wished to keep minor and knew all along that it could not be done," and the dark secret consuming her mother's life. Finally, she tells us how she lived with and learned from Aldous and Maria Huxley on the French Riviera, developing the sense of purpose and determination that made her the great writer she would become.