A Legacy

 

An uncharitable reader might accuse Sybille Bedford of re-hashing the same material over and over. I've now read three versions of the story of herself and her own family -- in the autobiography Jigsaw, the fragmented non-fiction Quicksands, and now in this novel, A Legacy. But frankly, when the material is so rich and so fascinating, I don't blame her at all for mining it as deeply as possible.

There's really not much crossover with Jigsaw. A Legacy is largely the story of what came before Sybille herself was born, the tangle of two families, scandals, forbidden marriages, mental illness, murder and suicide. Bedford's sometimes elliptical style, the large cast of characters, and the unspoken social conventions of turn of the 20th century Berlin meant I was sometimes confused about what was actually happening, though to be fair to Bedford, I did take a break from A Legacy to read a couple of library novels, and I lost track of events. 

I was chuffed to see an endorsement from Nancy Mitford on the back cover: One of the very best novels I have ever read. Wow, you could certainly die happy with a blurb like that under your belt. I might not go that far, but I did enjoy A Legacy and its peek into a vanished world.