Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
Before the Deluge
By Hilary Mantel
A Legacy
by Sybille Bedford
Counterpoint, 368 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Writers aspire to lead useful lives; not useful to the community of course, but to themselves. Exotic or outcast origins are useful, and so is a talent for catastrophe, self-induced if need be. There is nothing so sad one can't capitalize on it; the general rule for a writer's life is the worse things get, the better they get. In this respect, Sybille Bedford's early life was very promising. Born in Berlin in 1911, the child of an unhappy marriage, she was dispatched like a badly labeled package from one European country to the next, crossing frontiers and changing languages; from the age of sixteen or so, she was left to organize her own education, both sentimental and practical. Someone of a less robust sensibility might have been destroyed by the experience, but Bedford put it to work in four remarkable books which draw on her childhood and young adult life. Through a writing career which continued into the 1990s, she showed her relish for change, risk, movement, innovation; but in her fiction her adult self is almost invisible, and she has made her memory her chief resource, putting her early years at the heart of her life's work.
Review, 5094 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |