Jigsaw

"When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners" - Bruce Chatwin

Blurb:

This intensely remembered, partly autobiographical novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, describes the childhood of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the wars. When her father dies, she swaps life in a run-down German chateau for an exhilarating existence with her beautiful, talented and unreliable mother on the French Riviera.

Sent away to England for schooling, the gypsy-like Billi ricochets between short-lived tutors and a life of reading, friends and public lectures. Returning to the Mediterranean, her unorthodox education - intellectual, emotional and sexual - continues among the vibrant community of artists, exiles and intellectuals who have colonised the coast, coaxing her towards a life of literature.

Author Biog:

Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, in 1911, and was privately educated in Italy, England and France. She published her first book, The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey, in 1953. By the time it was reissued, seven years later, as A Visit to Don Otavio, it had won a reputation as a classic of travel writing. A Legacy appeared in 1956, and three other novels have followed: A Favourite of the Gods (1963), A Compass Error (1968) and Jigsaw (1989), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Best We Can Do (1958), an account of the murder trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams, was the first of Mrs Bedford's writings on law at work. She has reported on some of the most important criminal trials of our times, including those of Jack Ruby and the former staff at Auschwitz. The Faces of Justice (1961) collected her observations on the courts in England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. As It Was (1990) brought together further essays on justice as well as her celebrated writings on food, wine and European travel. In 1973 Mrs Bedford published a two-volume, authorized life of her friend and mentor Aldous Huxley. Stephen Spender called this book 'one of the masterpieces of biography'. Mrs Bedford lives in London, where she is a vice president of English PEN. In 1981 she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1994 was elected a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. This new edition of Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education coincides with the publication of Sybille Bedford's memoir Quicksands in June 2005.

Passage:

He had been brought up in a house like Feldkirch, like Feldkirch before we were alone. There had been brothers, country pursuits, they had been happy. One boy was sent to cadet school, could not bear it and made a dramatic escape, walking by night, hiding by day, making immense detours to escape re-capture. He reached home half-starved, half-crazed. They fed him up, then sent him back. He tried to kill himself by swallowing a box of matches. They sent him back all the same. He did not go mad, he was not put away. In fact he became a cavalry officer, commander of his regiment and in due course he married. How far was he maimed? Too late to say. Eccentric he must have been. Animals were his interest and he had a great way with them. Wild animals. He kept wolves and used to give them jewelled collars for Christmas, or so my father told me without turning a hair. Sapphires (were they really?) for the wolves, not for the wife; my father's tone indicated that this was a mistake. The wife was a beautiful young woman with a great appeal to men. My father's brother was stationed in a small garrison town called Allenstein at the confines of East Prussia, and she is supposed to have slept with half the regiment, commissioned and non-commissioned. One Christmas night (1908 or'09) a captain came to dinner; afterwards he pretended to leave and instead hid in the drive. When the house was in darkness he crept back. He had put thick socks over his shoes and he had a revolver in his pocket. My father's brother called out, Who's there? and turned on a light. He stood in that light and the captain shot at him and killed him. In prison he wrote a confession saying that he had been madly in love with the colonel's wife, Antonia was her name, and that she had made him do it. The captain hanged himself in his cell before the trial. Antonia was arrested and tried for murder; she was sentenced to death. A psychiatric expert managed to get her certified and she was not executed - which according to German law would have been by the axe - but confined instead in a mental institution. From that she was released, by the psychiatrist's efforts, within weeks. They went to Italy and got married. The Allenstein murder was a national sensation. At the time my mother was engaged to my father. She was about to doubt the wisdom of her engagement when my father's brother was shot and she found it no longer permissible to back out. They were married in 1910. Some people found it amusing to ask when being introduced to her, 'The murderess?' whose name of course she bore now. Eventually she took my father away and they lived in Spain for a time. My impending birth put an end to that. They went back and bought Feldkirch. I owe my existence to the Allenstein affair.

Topics for Discussion:

Back to top

The Hill of Kronos

'I have nothing but gratitude for this devoted, this splendid, this unique book: to read it is to have the experience of Greece itself.' Dilys Powell, The Times

Blurb:

Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. The sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly he sees the country through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience and insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

Author Biog:

Peter Levi was a prolific writer, best known as a poet, classical scholar and Oxford don, Levi was also a translator of Russian and Greek writing. His travels through Greece, which began in 1963, led to an extended companionship with such writers as George Pavlopoulos, Katsimbalis, and George Seferis; with Seferis he was politically involved in Athens during the 'reign of the Colonels' in the late 1960s.

He wrote biographies of Tennyson, Edward Lear, Virgil, Horace, Shakespeare, and John Milton, and books including The Greek world (with Eliot Porter), An Atlas of the Greek World and The Pelican History of Greek Literature, The Frontiers of Paradise: a Study of Monks and Monasteries and The Art of Poetry as well as 22 volumes of poetry.

Levi became a clergyman at he age of seventeen. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1964 and left the priesthood in 1977 to marry Deirdre Connolly three years after the death of her husband, the writer Cyril Connolly.

He spent a year as archaeological correspondent for The Times newspaper before returning to academic life. In 1984, he was elected Oxford's professor of poetry, a largely honorary appointment which he held until 1989. In 1988 he announced that he had found a previously unknown poem by Shakespeare in a manuscript at the Huntington Library in San Marino. The weight of academic opinion disagreed.

Towards the end of his life Levi became almost completely blind. His book Viriditas contains the moving lyrics he composed in his head, while walking round the green in the Gloucestershire village where he lived. He died in 2000 at the age of 63.

Passage:

I rattled down to Chazia with the workmen in the back of an open van. My friend, whose name was Sabbas, had decided to take me under his protection. There was no hotel, and in those days only one tavern, but Chazia did have an open-air cinema. First I was taken to his house in a back street for a wash and brush up. It was a tiny house held together by whitewash and enormous morning glories. He dressed in smart trousers and a freshly pressed, glittering white shirt, but when I was ready he surveyed me with horror. Had I no freshly ironed shirt? It was a disgrace to his house if I came out of it looking like I looked. His wife would wash and dry and iron me a shirt. How could I manage, roaming about Greece with no woman to look after me? The shirt was ready in no time, since I had one that was clean but crumpled, though it was less snowy than his. We went out. His wife stayed at home, like everyone else's wife.

The square was full, and chairs were hard to find, but we drank an ouzo with an olive and a chip and a piece of cheese. I was introduced to old men with moustaches and exquisite manners, while they drank or pondered their ouzo and ate their olive and their chip. The cinema was even more crowded. The sky was darkening. Someone in my row was holding a sprig of jasmine. At last the film started and we sat upright on our wooden chairs. It was called The Bandit of Mani. It was wonderfully, hilariously bad. The bandit pursued a complicated and dramatic vendetta which I was hardly able to follow. There was a lot of shooting with very loud guns. A girl was dragged along the ground by her hair. The whole audience cheered enthusiastically for the villains throughout.

Greek films in Greek villages used to be like that. Foreign films with subtitles add a special dimension. I saw Gone with the Wind once in Naples with the audience taking the wrong side, and an American western somewhere near Argos that started with a comic scene of an old-fashioned train, while the audience watched it stone-faced because to them it was a perfectly ordinary local train. Still, they did shake with laughter when the heroine met the hero at the station with a horse and trap, at the idea of a woman driving. Chazia is special all the same, as I was soon to discover…

Topics for Discussion:

Back to top

The Village in the Jungle

'As fatalistic as a Greek tragedy…reading it has been a real experience and not one easily forgotten.'

Blurb:

A Village in the Jungle is the classic novel of Ceylon. It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been immersed into the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the Tropics. It is set amongst a handful of peasant cultivators hacking out a fragile existence against the brutal workings of an indifferent fate and the malevolent machinations of their neighbours and social superiors.

Seven years as a young colonial administrator gave Leonard Woolf the experience from which to craft this beautifully wrought but harrowing novel. It sings with the truth of his first hand experience and with a long, well-tempered reaction to injustice. He also skillfully incorporated local story-telling traditions and beliefs into his chillingly narrative - which was given the ultimate accolade of be translated into Sinhalese and Tamil to become one of the best loved and known stories within Sri Lanka (Ceylon).

Biog:

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in London in 1880. Educated at St. Paul's School, he then won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899. In 1904 he joined the Civil Service in Ceylon, working there for several years as a government agent. On his return to England in May 1911 he married Virginia Stephen who was, like her husband, a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. His first novel, The Village in the Jungle, was published in 1913 followed by Wise Virgins (19140. His other books include Socialism and Co-operation (1921), After the Deluge (1931), Barbarians at the Gate (1939) and Principia Politica (1953), and a five-volume memoir. He worked as literary editor of the Nation from 1923-30, as well as for the Hogarth Press, which he co-founded with Virginia in 1917. He died in 1969.

Passage:

The effect upon Hinnihami was different. Tired and hungry though she was, even the great crowd in the courtyard excited her. As each new pilgrim arrived he called aloud upon the god; and the whole crowd took up the cry, which rose and fell around the shrine. She who had before never seen more than forty or fifty people in her life felt the weight and breath of thousands that jostled and pressed her. Her heart beat as, under the flare of the torches, hundreds of arms were raised in supplication, and to the crash of the tomtoms the name of the god thundered through the air. The tears came into her eyes and ran down her cheeks as time after time the roll of the many voices surged about her; and when at last the great moment came, and the kapurala appeared carrying the god under the black cloth, and over the sea of arms the elephant lifted up its trunk and trumpeted as the god was placed upon its back, she stretched out her hands and cried to the god to hear her. They followed in the rear of the procession, where men roll over and over in the dust, and childless women touch the ground with their forehead between every step, in fulfilment of their vows…

Hinnihami felt the power of the god in her and over them all; she felt how near he was to them, mysteriously hidden beneath the great cloth which lay upon the elephant's back. She felt again the awe which great trees in darkness and the shadows of the jungle at nightfall roused in her, the mystery of darkness and power, which no one can see. And again and again as the procession halted, and the cry of the multitude rolled back to them, her breath was caught by sobs, and again she lifted her hands to the god and called upon his name. She formulated no prayer to him, she spoke no words of supplication: only in excitement and exaltation of entreaty she cried out the name of the god.

Topics for Discussion

Back to top