A Visit to Don Otavio
A Visit to Don Otavio

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher:

Published: 2002-07-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780907871873

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, "one of the kindest men I ever met". She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

A Visit to Don Otavio
A Visit to Don Otavio

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-10-29

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1458759776

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This affectionate study of the Mexican temper is ''one of the most charming travel books ever written.'' - The Atlantic Monthly Before returning to the Old World after World War II, Sybille Bedford resolved to see something more of the New. ''I had a great longing to move,'' she said, ''to hear another language, eat new food, to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible.'' And so she set out for Mexico - and, incidentally, to write what Bruce Chatwin called the best travel book of the twentieth century, ''a book of marvels, to be read again and again and again.''

A Visit to Don Otavio
A Visit to Don Otavio

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1590179706

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

A Legacy
A Legacy

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2015-03-03

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1590178270

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Two vastly different families—one Jewish, one Catholic—are joined in marriage in this “witty, elegant, and uproariously funny” historical drama set in pre-war Europe (Evelyn Waugh). “Partly ironic, partly nostalgic, A Legacy calls to mind other novels that portray the zenith and decline of an ostentatious old order.” —The Wall Street Journal A Legacy is the tale of two very different families, the Merzes and the Feldens. The Jewish Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors. Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore. Secure in their huge town house, they devote themselves to little more than enjoying their comforts and ensuring their wealth. The Feldens are landed aristocracy, well off but not rich, from Germany’s Catholic south. After Julius von Felden marries Melanie Merz the fortunes of the two families will be strangely, indeed fatally, entwined. Set during the run-up to World War I, a time of weirdly mingled complacency and angst, A Legacy is captivating, magnificently funny, and profound, an unforgettable image of a doomed way of life.

A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error
A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1681370573

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Favourite of the Gods is the story of two generations of a single family, united by a strong matrilineal bond but divided by the customs of their differing nationalities. Anna Howland, the matriarch and American heiress, born in the 1870s to a prominent, liberal New England family marries an Italian prince and makes her home in Rome; her daughter Constanza, the favorite of the title, inherits her mother’s beauty, intelligence, and wealth, along with her father’s Catholicism, which she soon rejects. When disaster strikes, Anna and the prince fall back on the standards of behavior of their disparate cultures; Constanza, with her European upbringing, is free to plot her own course, and she does so with daring, making an unconventional life for herself in England and on the continent during and after the First World War. Her own daughter Flavia is the heroine of A Compass Error, which begins where the first novel concludes. Flavia too is a brilliant young woman, though both more brash and more faltering than her mother, studying for her entrance exam to Oxford when she becomes involved with a mysterious woman whose arrival at a sensitive moment in Flavia’s adolescence will alter both her and her mother’s lives forever.

Jigsaw
Jigsaw

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 168137191X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize—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 château, 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.

Quicksands
Quicksands

Author: Sybille Bedford

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0141911883

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Beginning in 1956 with the publication of A Legacy, Sybille Bedford has narrated - in fiction and non-fiction - what has been by turns her sensuous, harrowing, altogether remarkable life. In this magnificent memoir, she moves from Berlin during the Great War to the artists' set on the Côte d'Azur of the 1920s, through lovers, mentors, seducers and friends, and from genteel yet shabby poverty to relative comfort in London's Chelsea. Whether evoking the simple sumptuousness of a home-cooked meal or tracing the heart-rending outline of an intimate betrayal, she offers spellbinding reflections on how history imprints itself on private lives.

The Fearful Void
The Fearful Void

Author: Geoffrey Moorhouse

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0571287123

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'It was because I was afraid that I had decided to attempt a crossing of the great Sahara desert, from west to east, by myself and by camel. No one had ever made such a journey before . . .' In October 1972 Geoffrey Moorhouse began his odyssey across the Sahara from the Atlantic to the Nile, a distance of 3,600 miles. His reason for undertaking such an immense feat was to examine the roots of his fear, to explore an extremity of human experience. From the outset misfortune was never far away; and as he moved further into that 'awful emptiness' the physical and mental deprivation grew more intense. In March 1973, having walked the last 300 miles, Moorhouse, ill and exhausted, reached Tamanrasset, where he decided to end his journey. The Fearful Void is the moving record of his struggle with fear and loneliness and, ultimately, his coming to terms with the spiritual as well as the physical dangers of the desert.

Sybille Bedford
Sybille Bedford

Author: Selina Hastings

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781101947913

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"From the celebrated biographer of Nancy Mitford, and Evelyn Waugh: a full and fascinating biography--the very first--of the long-admired and universally-acclaimed English writer. When Sybille Bedford died in 2006 at the age of 94, she had written ten books, including four novels and a biography of Aldous Huxley. Her novels--the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker--all fictionalized her extraordinarily colorful, peripatetic life and dramatic family history. Born just outside Berlin, she lived alternately in Baden, the south of France, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and London. As an adolescent she was mentored by Aldous Huxley . . . Martha Gellhorn convinced her to write her first novel, A Legacy, which would finally be published in 1956 . . . in the 1960s she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly 100 trials including that of Auschwitz officials, and Jack Ruby's for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald . . . she was an important figure in the lesbian community in Europe and America . . . and though she often found herself in dire financial straits, her life was just as often underwritten by devoted men or her women lovers. She was possessed of a fierce intelligence, wit, curiosity, compassion, and unstinting engagement with all the vagaries and variety of life. And Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the woman and the writer in all the richness of her character and achievements"--