RIP Sybille Bedford

I read A Visit to Don Otavio years ago. What a fascinating life she led. We have a copy of A Compass Error at home, which I think RJM has read. I think I'll start that rather than what I had next on the pile.

I really like her two volume biograph of Aldous Huxley; in fact, so much so that I never returned it to the school library.

I finished A Compass Error last night. A book with some very tense moments that I had to make myself stop reading a few times. Self-centered, naive, a bit pretentious, 17-year-old Flavia has manipulated things so she is left living alone in Provence between the world wars. She falls prey to an older woman, who works hard to prise a secret from young Flavia. The nuance of this cocky teenager coming to the realization that she's been had due to her own infatuation is really well done. Several amazing long soliloquies relate the backstory, and the novel's central theme - the truth takes two: one to tell and one to listen. If no one talks and no one pays attention, the truth doesn't get created.

This is a follow-on to A Favourite of the Gods, but tells a parallel story.

Jigsaw is being serialised on Radio 4 at the moment. Did she kind of write the same book several times over?

I'm not sure, as I've only read the one. Was Favourite of the Gods similar? From the obit, I gathered she used and re-used her life situations (ex-pat-ness, dashed fortunes, etc.) in the novels. Don Otavio I remember as simply good travel writing.

Well A Compass Error sounds a little bit like Jigsaw (which is autobiographical) which in turn sounds a bit like A Favourite of the Gods. Still, write what you know!

RJM had read A Legacy, though apparently ages ago. I'll have to ask him what he remembers of it. I can see Favourite and Compass Error having commonality - the main character in the first is the mother of the main character of the second - but reading that brief blurb about Jigsaw (in the article you initially linked) does make it sound more of the same.

I did feel she had a good ear for dialogue and also for the psychology of manipulation - both the many ways we manipulate and how we allow ourselves to be manipulated. Part of why I had to set it down a few times and get some breathing space.

Yes I really felt that too (from A Favourite...). In that way and in the relative narrowness of scope and in the emotional precision, she reminds me a bit of E.M. Forster.

I asked RJM what he remembered of A Legacy over lunch and he was no help at all. Except it had a funny bit that has stuck with him all these years - there is some fishing, and a man holds up a fish to show the girl, who says "A man had never displayed a fish at full length to me before." Which he thought both brilliant and hilarious.