4.5 starsOne of the great travelogues and in Bruce Chatwin’s opinion “the greatest travel book of the twentieth century”. It helps a great deal that Bedford can write well and has a gift for observation and description. Living from 1911 to 2006, Bedford had a long and colourful life and is not appreciated as a writer as she should be. Bedford had escaped from France in 1940 and spent the war in the US. After the war she decided that before returning to Europe she would travel for a while in Mexico. She went with a travelling companion referred to as E throughout. E was in fact Esther Mary Arthur (at that point married to the grandson of the US president Chester Arthur). Bedford and Arthur were having a love affair at the time. As Chatwin says in his introduction, they approached their adventure “without an itinerary, without preconceptions, and with their senses wide open”. That propensity to go with the flow makes for an entertaining read. As I mentioned, Bedford has great descriptive powers, this is about a bus journey;“A well-grown sow lies heaving in the aisle. My neighbor has a live turkey hen on her lap and the bird simply cannot help it, she must partly sit on my lap, too. This is very hot. Also she keeps fluffing out her surprisingly harsh feathers. From time to time, probably to ease her own discomfort, the bird stands up. Supported on six pointed claws, one set of them on my knee, she digs her weight into us and shakes herself. Dust and lice emerge. On my other side, in the aisle, stands a little boy with a rod on which dangles a dead, though no doubt freshly caught, fish. With every lurch of the conveyance, and it is all lurches, the fish, moist but not cool, touches my arm and sometimes my averted cheek.”The book moves between pure travelogue, descriptions of Mexico’s bloody history (from Cortes to the nineteenth and twentieth century dictators), detailed descriptions of food and meals (always a plus), the vicissitudes of travel, he varying quality of hotels and of course, Don Otavio and his extended family and servants. Bedford, in an interview late in her life described it thus; “It is a travel book written by a novelist. I wanted to get across the extraordinary beauty of Mexico, the allegro quality of its climate, with the underlying panic and violence inherited from a long and bloody history.”Don Otavio is a slightly down at heel aristocratic type with a colourful family and some interesting neighbours who are similarly middle class with a smattering of those escaping Europe. Bedford has a sharp wit and excellent sense of humour. It does have to be noted that the travellers were middle class as were most of the people they stayed with and the lives of ordinary people are at a distance. That may have been inevitable, but there are many good vignettes and descriptions of customs and tradition (especially relating to the Catholic Church). All in all and excellent read by a very good writer.
Sybille Bedford's 1953 tale of travel to and about Mexico with a female friend, E, is magnificent and funny as anything. All of the glory, squalor and mystery of Mexico is revealed as S and E travel by train, bus, auto and cart to cities, country palaces and the coastal areas. Their sense of wonder and newness is everywhere, at every stop.Before hoards of tourists and the commercial development they bring, S and E are quite alone and independent in their wanderings, sometimes without food or water. In this passage, a local gives them tortillas: "...he had produced the tortillas from inside his shirt. Hygiene has cut off man from man more than any class distinctions. Throughout it, E. read. I cannot think now how she managed it. I do not know how she stood it at all, how we both stood it. If we live to an old age, we shall tell ourselves about the thousands and thousands of miles we rocked through noons and nightfalls over the surface of Mexico in second class motor buses, and we shall be dazzled. Then we were just inured."Their encounter and long stay with Don Otavio at his family estate at the lake near Guadalajara is splendid. S and E exist in a cushion of luxury and delight. Don Otavio himself is splendid, with his "con permissio" as he politely takes his leave.Towards the end of their stay with Don Otavio, S goes off with some Anglo friends, determined to drive through the jungle to the coast. Ignoring the preparations and warnings of an annoying man who does know more, they set off with some chaos, get stuck, stranded, rescued and return without reaching the ocean.How wonderful Bedford's book is still in print. It should be required reading for all those traveling south.
Do You like book A Visit To Don Otavio (2003)?
First of all, a travel writer of yesteryear who is entirely obsessed with food! A woman after my own heart.Second of all, a frequently laugh out loud book, even as you were learning quite a bit about Mexican history.Third, a wonderfully idiosyncratic and erudite look at a pre-mass tourism Mexico. A bit reminiscent of that English chap who tromped around Europe on the eve of World War II (Patrick Leigh Fermor, it took me a minute) but where Fermor felt show offy, Bedford just seems smart, wry and like the kind of person I, at least, would have loved to take a long ago trip with. To be clear, I think you have to like this genre-the highly idiosyncratic travelogue that gives a glimpse into a world we can never see because it is further away in time than it is in distance. But if this kind of thing fascinates you, as it does me, Bedford's cast of eccentrics, catalog of travel mishaps, awe at the hearty cheap Mexican meals (described lovingly course by course) and occasional pointed historical lecture will not fail to charm.
—Elaine
Wanting to get into a Mexican state of mind, I chose this as my plane read to Mexico City. Unsurprisingly, my Mexico City was much more cosmopolitan than her post-WWII Mexico City yet her account left me with a strong desire to follow her into the Mexican countryside, especially if I had the opportunity to be hosted by such a hospitable country gentleman on his vast family compound of villas. I will say I did experience the same high level of hospitality while in Mexico but I didn’t get to visit the secret convent hidden in walls and cupboards of the homes of the village elites or get lost in an overgrown jungle on aborted attempt to visit the ocean. I’m also happy to report that no drunks were tossed off moving buses and no bandits arrived at the scheduled time to go through our luggage. Throughout the book, there is the threat of violence, heightened by the author’s rendition of the various Mexican uprisings and assassinations, but in actuality, with the exception of the poor drunk on the bus, everyone remains safe and sound and the biggest tragedy is that the author never gets to sample Don Otavio’s claret.If you want to learn more about Sybille Bedford, check out this 2005 New Yorker review which originally prompted me to pick up this book years ago. Sybille Bedford died in 2006.
—Happyreader
utterly funny, informative, historical, picaresque travelogue of two women traveling alone in mexico in 1953. it is sybille bedford's debut and she never looked back don't think.they start by boarding the train in nyc, training and busing to DF, then by train, plane, bus, taxi, foot and car sweating freezing biting and getting bitten to central highlands, over to colima to acapulco and lake chapala (where they spend many months in idyll and near death) to oxaca to pueblo back to chapaladisasters and delights and wonderful writing.
—Tuck
