Volume 52, Number 13 · August 11, 2005
Child of the Century
By Alan Hollinghurst
Quicksands: A Memoir
by Sybille Bedford
Counterpoint, 370 pp., $24.95
It's hard to state with any real confidence the facts about Sybille Bedford, beyond the unignorable fact of her being, at her best, a brilliant and original writer. Her subject has often been herself and her immediate world, but treated with much obliquity, reticence, and fictional license. These are all legitimate habits, or tactics, and discretion is a welcome, if old-fashioned, virtue; but their result is that you rarely know exactly where you stand. You could, for example, read her entire output without ever discovering her name, that is, the name of her family, which she relinquished by making a marriage of convenience in 1936; and it is only in her new memoir, Quicksands, published in her ninety-fifth year, that she satisfies half a century of curiosity about the identity of Mr. Bedford.
Review, 3977 words
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