Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

Sybille Bedford's well-told, intimate memoir Jigsaw (1989) unfolds her fraught relationship with her wayward mother, who abandoned her as a child and took her up again more-or-less when Sybille, aka Baroness Billi, was a teenager. Between the two world wars, Sybille's adventures in Italy and the south of France with her mother, stepfather, and neighbors who became surrogate parents of sorts include Aldous & Maria Huxley and a couple who seemed to have glided from a painting by Tamara Lempicka. Sent to London in quest of education, Sybille lives first among a moveable household of hard-up bohemians and then more or less with a pair of literary sisters from Berlin who have melodramas of their own. Jigsaw is best read after Bedford's show more masterpiece, A Legacy (1956), which recounts the florid history of her father's family. Jigsaw is less forthcoming about Bedford's maternal ancestry though the portrait of a writer-manqué mother who became a morphine addict is vividly conveyed by physical descriptions and dialogue. show less

Another one from the 1989 Booker shortlist, this lightly fictionalised autobiographical novel was my first experience of reading Bedford and a very enjoyable read.

The book describes her unconventional childhood between the wars. The story starts in Germany - when her parents divorced she lived with her father in a Schloss near the French and Swiss borders - her father was a connoisseur and collector - slightly impoverished but reluctant to sell his prized possessions.

When her father died she joined her mother, initially in Italy, where she was starting a relationship with the much younger Alessandro that led to an unlikely marriage. The young Sybille was a ward of a German court and as part of an agreement with her trustees it was show more decided that she would be educated in England, where the friends entrusted with finding a school decided to educate her themselves.

Her mother and her young husband fled Mussolini's Italy and settled in the village of Sanary-sur-Mer on the South coast of France, and the rest of Sybille's childhood was spent alternating between Sanary and London.

The story is evocative and full of intriguing details and joie de vivre - she mixed with some interesting people including Aldous Huxley who also settled in Sanary. Others appear pseudonymously to protect their reputations. The dominant character remains her mother whose descent into drug addiction is described in the final part of the story. show less

Jigsaw. An unsentimental education is a(n) (auto-) biographical novel, describing the period from the early to mid-Twentieth Century particularly the 1920s. Unfortunately, much less attention is paid to the Huxleys than I had hoped, perhaps because the author had already written a biography of Aldous Huxley. The book doesn't really take off until about page 80. Very lyrical and inspiring. Surprisingly, this book was first published in 1989, and the introduction to this edition, written in 1999 is by the author herself.

Writing about the 1920, Sybille Bedford writes about another world, her life as a young woman at that tme. She portrays a chaotic childhood, living with her father, then her mother, running away from home. She gives us exquisite portraits of people she meets in all the different places she lives.
As a teenager, she seems to live an idyllic life moving seamlessly between London and the south of France. However, the book gets darker and more emotional, although always with some reserve.
An interesting and well written book.

surprise package - strong sense of life and place, couldn't put it down and didn't want it to finish!

Continued semi-autobiographical story of the Jewish-Catholic girl "Billi" from "A Legacy". Insightful regarding the bohemian lifestyle on the French Mediterranean. The author really did experience childhood friendships with Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and other well-known writers. Her mother was a morphine addict. The nine quotations in the comments section are my exact Kindle highlights.

Reread after years, upgraded to 5*.