Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

Sybille Bedford's latest novel picks up where her first, A Legacy, left off, leading us out of the Kaiser's Germany into the wider Europe of the 1920s and the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story of her scholar-gipsy childhood and of her many teachers, beginning with her father, a pleasure-loving German baron, and her brilliant, beautiful, erratic mother. Later, on the Mediterranean coast of France, she meets the artists and intellectuals who will show her the way to a life's work in literature, among them the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria. Germany, Italy, England, France; mentors, examples, seducers, friends - each place, each person is a bright piece in the puzzle of Billi's identity. But Billi is more than the sum of all these pieces, just as Jigsaw is more than the sum of Bedford's art.