a great autobiographical intellectual novel!

If you needed reminding of how literature has changed in the last thirty years, listen to Jigsaw. It was published in 1989, the year Kazuo Ishiguro won the Booker Prize and 80 year-old Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw was a runner up.

In recounting the life of Billi raised, like Sybille herself, in Germany in the early twentieth century, Jigsaw is semi-biographical novel about the author’s own fractured life as she grows from childhood into an uneasy maturity . It’s densely packed with strikingly real characters with the webs of their complex lives and relationships, a proportion of them real-life, like Aldous Huxley amongst other writers and artists, and others created from imagination.

The book is also a ravishing travel book of the vividly recreated contrasting European places settings in the 1920s in all their painterly brilliance or their soul-destroying darkness where Billi and Sybille herself lived : Germany, Italy, the South of France and England .

When her German father dies, young Billi is sent away to live with her truly awful mother who was given to violent rages and heavy drinking and took pleasure in breaking all social conventions. She has married Alessandro, an Italian a great deal younger than herself. Later, the life of Billi’s ageing mother is a dramatic tragedy as, temporarily abandoned by Alessandro, she becomes increasingly addicted to morphine, rejects all attempts to help her and forces her wretched daughter to procure it for her.

This a highly intellectual work of analysis as Sybille works with the pieces of the jigsaw which have made up her life . All the characters, genuine and created, are have intensely intellectual whilst leading their apparently uncaring, selfish, hedonistic, emotionally chaotic, food and wine fuelled lives . Their indulgence in the latter can certainly become irritating.

It is staggering that English was not Sybille’s first language but only one in which she was fluent. One of the great pleasures of Jigsaw is the amount of French sometimes, but not always, subtly translated , and so beautifully incorporated seamlessly into the text by the narrator Sian Thomas.

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