****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Sybille Bedford was born in Germany in 1911, the daughter of a South German Baron and a Berlin Jew with some English ancestry. When her father died in 1925, she joined her mother (long since divorced) first in Italy and then in France, where she became close friends with Aldous Huxley. She never returned to Germany except in her imagination, as in this novel, which combines elements of her family history into a saga of the German upper classes between 1870 and 1914. In her preface, she explains the three very different, "eccentric, even anachronistic" families linked by circumstance and marriage: "One of the families was solid, upholstered, Jewish Berlin, the city of the disciplines, drives and deceits of the Protestant Prussian North; the other two belonged to discrepant realities of the Catholic South: one somnolent, agrarian, backward-looking; the other obsessed by ecumenical dreams of European dimensions."Bedford spends very little time on "her" character in the story, here called Francesca. Most of her attention is devoted to Francesca's father, Julius von Felden, a former diplomat, art collector, and flaneur. Considerable attention is also given to his father, a French-speaking Baron from Baden resenting the recent unification of Germany, and his three brothers. These include Gustavus, the eldest, who marries into an ultra-Catholic noble family in the same region, and Jean, whose sufferings in a Prussian cadet school ultimately become a national cause célèbre. Julius, who had been living happily in the South of France with a monkey and two chimpanzees, marries a much younger girl from the Jewish Merz family in Berlin, and remains bound up with them even after his wife's early death. The men in both families, actually, are presented as charming but profligate drones. The women, however, are very strong indeed, including Francesca's charismatic English mother Caroline, who bursts late into the story like a supernova and immediately realigns the allegiances of both sexes.Bruce Chatwin described Bedford as "one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose." He is right, but the book is not at all easy to follow as a piece of narrative. Perhaps influenced by Cubism (or the narrative techniques of Henry Green), it tells its story in fragments, jumping around in place, time, and even languages, sometimes devoting pages to brief snippets of unattributed dialogue, like whispers in corridors or on street corners. It is often hard to know exactly what has happened, though I believe this vagueness is deliberate, especially when it comes to romantic matters. There are many implications of affairs, and even some doubt as to the parenthood of the various children. And in the feelings between several of the women, and to a lesser extent those of the men, there are distinct sexual ambiguities, perhaps reflecting Sybille Bedford's own orientation and her brief marriage of convenience to a gay man. But -- and I must emphasize this -- all the characters are fully realized and most are quite likable.David Leavitt (author of THE INDIAN CLERK) whose appreciation of the novel in that marvelous collection of reading lists, THE TOP TEN, first alerted me to Bedford, suggests that the story is a key to the sources of both World Wars. In the case of the Second, I don't agree; although there are brief shadows of antisemitism in the background, the book takes place in a different age. Nor does Bedford make any explicit reference to the approaching Great War. But this is a period about which I knew very little, and the portrait of transition between the Belle Époque and the Prussian-dominated German Reich is both interesting and informative. But you really read this book for its people, and they, for all their flaws, are a delight. [4.5 stars]
