Jigsaw
An Unsentimental Education
Autor*in: Bedford, Sybille
Jahr: 2018
Sprache: Englisch
Umfang: 352 S.
Verfügbar
- Inhalt:
- "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"--
- Sybille Bedford (1911â€"2006) was born Sybille von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany, to an aristocratic German father and a partly Jewish, Hamburg-born mother. Raised variously in Germany, Italy, France, and England, she lived with her mother and Italian stepfather after her father’s death when she was seven, and was educated privately. Encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Bedford began writing fiction at the age of sixteen and went on to publish four novels, all influenced by her itinerant childhood among the European aristocracy: A Legacy, A Favourite of the Gods, A Compass Error, and Jigsaw (short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize). She married Walter Bedford in 1935 and lived briefly in America during World War II, before returning to England. She was a prolific travel writer, the author of a two-volume biography of her friend Huxley, and a legal journalist, covering nearly one hundred trials. In 1981 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire.
Titelinformationen
Titel: Jigsaw
Autor*in: Bedford, Sybille
Verlag: Random House Digital Dist
ISBN: 9781681371924
Kategorie: Belletristik & Unterhaltung, Romane & Erzählungen
Format: ePub
Max. Ausleihdauer: 14 Tage