About book Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education (2001)
One of the great books. The memoirs of a girl of 20 or so, based frankly on Sybille's own life, who lives on a small estate in Baden, then shuttles between the south of France, London, Berlin, and various country cottages in England, all the time avoiding formal education and most of the time love, but with astonishing portraits of her father, a Frenchified German gentleman, her mother, something of a bolter - her earliest memory is of being parked in a pram while her mother has an afternoon with her lover, a Danish novelist once thought promising - and the various characters she attaches herself to. One of the greatest female (or male) bildungsromans ever written - with great stuff about food as well as love. It's also one of the only novels to treat the 1920s and early 1930s as they were and as they felt, and not as the I*R*O*N*I*C prelude to WWII, the holocaust, etc etc. Difficult to describe its excellence - here is how she connects this book to the story of the hero/victim of The Legacy. In "real life," the Jewish-German boy who went mad because he was sent back to the sadistic military school was the narrator's uncle, who didn't go mad, but became a German cavalry officer and married. "How far was he maimed [by the school experience?:]. Too late to say. Eccentric he must have been. Animals were his interest and he had a great way with them. Wild animals. He kept wolves and used to give them jewelled collars for Xhristmas, or so my father told me without turning a hair. Sapphires (were they really?) for the wolves, NOT for the wife; my father's tone indicated that this was a mistake."If you hear the tone of Anthony Powell in the prose, you are right - they are about the same age - but the human knowledge and involvement is so much greater with Bedford.
Wow.Okay, this was amazing. And it was in part amazing because I read all of her earlier fiction first, so I had a very good sense of how she was reworking her actual past and how she was reworking the fictional usages she had already made of her actual past.Is this a post-modern novel? I mean, it is a novel, and yet it's a memoir; the authorial voice talks about the ways she has used the events she's describing in her previous novels, and ... I don't think I can do it all justice in this review, it would need an essay.It was poignant, beautifully written, very intimate, and absolutely emotionally true, even if some pieces of it were pure fiction. The sense of being in the company of an elderly woman looking back on her life and describing it both as she experienced it in the moment and as she sees it now -- that was intense and lovely. I'm so glad I read this, despite the sorrow of some of the sections.
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This exquisitely written book reads sort of like the Portrait of The Artist as a Young Woman, although it doesn't necessarily sound like Joyce. The work also contains the requisite Proustian details of how the author spent her youth in Germany, Italy, France, and England, mostly between the two world wars. Bedford is probably better known as the biographer of Aldous Huxley, who, in real life, acted as her mentor. Here, the redoubtable Huxley appears as a character in Bedford's concededly autobiographical novel, but Bedford's mother steals the show as the true "character" in this retelling of Bedford's early life. I also caught whiffs of Edna O'Brien's "Country Girls" trilogy, at least insofar as this book serves as a coming-of-age story. There's not much plot, since most of the book revolves around Bedford's shuttling around between her father, her mother, and several other families, but the characters are wonderfully drawn.
—Lawrence A
Tutto quello che si legge nel libro e' tutto vero. La storia della giovinezza e dell'adolescenza di Sybille detta Billie e' avventurosa, leggera e divertente. Una adolescenza vissuta tra Francia e Inghilterra tra le due guerre frequentando artisti, pittori e sportivi. Un rapporto particolare con una mamma particolare, la frequentazione di coppie, trii e singolari personalità ...tutto fa scorrere questo libro velocemente e ti rimane la voglia di andare a vedere quelle località sulla costa francese di cui parla l'autrice. Cercherò il suo romanzo più famoso. Brava.
—alessandra falca
