A Legacy (New York Review Books Classics), by Sybille Bedford
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A Legacy (New York Review Books Classics), by Sybille Bedford
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A Legacy is the tale of two very different families, the Merzes and the Feldens. The Jewish Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors. Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore. Secure in their huge town house, they devote themselves to little more than enjoying their comforts and ensuring their wealth. The Feldens are landed aristocracy, well off but not rich, from Germany’s Catholic south. After Julius von Felden marries Melanie Merz the fortunes of the two families will be strangely, indeed fatally, entwined. Set during the run-up to World War I, a time of weirdly mingled complacency and angst, A Legacy is captivating, magnificently funny, and profound, an unforgettable image of a doomed way of life.
A Legacy (New York Review Books Classics), by Sybille Bedford- Amazon Sales Rank: #364934 in Books
- Brand: Bedford, Sybille/ Wineapple, Brenda (INT)
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Released on: 2015-03-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.95" h x .83" w x 4.99" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review “One of the very best novels I have ever read.” —Nancy Mitford “Dry wit, careful attendance to detail, dialogue in which there is ‘more to be said than can come through’—these are the hallmarks of Bedford’s fiction. She shows the ways in which the private lives of individuals reflect the larger political life of their culture, and vice versa; she portrays the evolution of Nazism and Fascism where it really took place—in living rooms and kitchens and on benches.” —David Leavitt “There’s such a wonderful tension between the hedonist and the historian in this author.” —Maria Bustillos, The Awl “A book of entirely delicious quality. Two families, vastly dissimilar, the one Jewish inartistic millionaires, the other slightly decadent Catholic aristocrats, become joined in marriage. Everything is new, cool, witty, elegant, and some scenes are uproariously funny.” —Evelyn Waugh “A Legacy lives by its delightful tart and feline wit, and by its author’s remarkable gift for capturing the breath of Europe past on the glass of fiction present.” —Time “At once historical novel and study of character, a collection of brilliantly objective portraits.” —Aldous Huxley “An astonishing and fascinating first novel.” —Janet Flanner “Bedford’s language is vibrant with an awareness of people and their manners and the countries that shape them; she moves in and out of European sensibilities with a natural ease. This reissue of A Legacy will give new readers a chance to swoon over her gracious felicities—and to come to share Bruce Chatwin’s assessment that, ‘when history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.’” —Sylvia Brownrigg"A Legacy is a story from a vanished world, a world before the deluge, and it provides its reader with the disorienting, melancholy pleasure derived from looking at old maps. It is a sophisticated book with a cosmopolitan gloss which flatters the reader, induces a nostalgia for other people’s past: for the vanished configurations of fallen empires, and days when the dice were shaken differently, where emotions were operatic and whims well-funded, where borders were crossed with ease but countries were different from each other, where beauty was viewed not merely as a personal asset but as part of an aesthetic tradition, and where raw experience had uncertain value till it was rationally examined and filtered through the lens of high culture...For a modern reader, some of the pleasure of A Legacy may be nostalgic, but the thrust of its intention is forward. What is the legacy of the nineteenth century, how and in what manner did it transform intolerant and divided societies into societies where mass murder was practiced?" —Hilary Mantel, The New York Review of Books“The characters are allowed to speak and see; they move about a great deal…Bedford is…interested in what they do, what they seem like to others, what they say, and what she can do to her sentences…Her genius is to make all this matter, to allow surface to suggest depth, to create excitement by playing with tone, to direct the reader toward the lives of her characters and the spirit of the age by using implication, by letting the rhythms do the work, by surprising with her diction and the texture of her prose and her dialogue. A Legacy makes clear that she is one of the finest and most original prose stylists of her age.” —Colm Tóibín, Bookforum"[W]itty and opulently beautiful…[a] richly realized historical drama….Partly ironic, partly nostalgic, A Legacy calls to mind other novels that portray the zenith and decline of an ostentatious old order. It’s as funny as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited but mercifully free of that book’s snobbery and God-bothering. It has the tragicomic temperament of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, but its writing, skimmed of exposition and distilled to quicksilver impressions, is more enticing. The novel fuses the heft and layering of a 19th-century family chronicle with a sparkling, allusive prose style learned from modernism…A Legacy is [Bedford’s] magnum opus, and a little harmony has been restored to literature now that it’s back again in bookstores." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal“The extraordinary feat of A Legacy is to be both an intimate family drama and an objective exposition of history...A Legacy is as perfect as a novel gets. It’s written with the sentence-by-sentence intensity of a short story, the narrative sweep of a history, and the tragi-comic interest of a family drama. Moreover, it is as significant as a novel gets, full of the interest of people distant from us in time and custom but recognizably human, and effortlessly illustrative of a period and society lost to us but incalculably important for the world we live in. Read it.” —Robert Minto, Open Letters Monthly
About the Author
Sybille Bedford (1911–2006) was born Sybille von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany, to an aristocratic German father and a partly Jewish, British-born mother. Raised variously in Germany, Italy, France, and England, she lived with her mother and Italian stepfather after her father’s death when she was seven, and was educated privately. Encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Bedford began writing fiction at the age of sixteen and went on to publish four novels, all influenced by her itinerant childhood among the European aristocracy: A Legacy (1956), A Favourite of the Gods (1963), A Compass Error (1968), and Jigsaw (1989, short-listed for the Booker Prize). She married Walter Bedford in 1935 and lived briefly in America during World War II, before returning to England. She was a prolific travel writer, the author of a two-volume biography of her friend Aldous Huxley, and a legal journalist, covering nearly one hundred trials. In 1981 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire. Brenda Wineapple’s books include Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848–1877 and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a 2014 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Wineapple lives in New York City with her husband, the composer Michael Dellaira.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful. Distinctive, engaging, at times fascinating, a little bewildering -- but is it great? I reserve judgment. By R. M. Peterson This is a difficult novel to review because it truly is sui generis, at least in my experience. It also was for me rather difficult to read. It has a labyrinthine plot and the writing at times is rather cryptic, with the result that I would have to re-read the novel to follow all the twists and turns and catch all the ironies and buried connections. Even so, A LEGACY is engaging, at times fascinating.It is set in Europe, primarily Germany, circa 1890 to 1910. It is the story of three families brought together and then entangled by unlikely marriages. One family, absurdly wealthy, is Jewish and lives in Berlin; the other two are aristocratic Catholic families from Baden, one of which is well-connected and influential in German politics and the other of which is rather feckless and is alienated from Germany (they speak French and gravitate towards French culture).On one level, A LEGACY is an impressionistic portrayal of Germany -- its culture, society, and politics -- during the quarter-century run-up to World War I: bourgeois pretentions and hypocrisy, aristocratic arrogance, anti-Semitism, and growing militarism. On another level, A LEGACY is a novel of moral quandaries, of doing the right thing amidst competing demands and urges, both social and personal. Near the end of the novel, one of the central characters is pressured to shade what she says about the suicide of her brother-in-law so that his wife, a devout Catholic, can believe that he died in a state of grace. She almost shrieks in rebellion: "There have been too many lies." She goes on: "Now it must have a stop. It is a feeling I have. It is choking me. I feel if there were one more lie we should all perish."I understand that Sybille Bedford was unflinchingly, and unsettlingly, straightforward and honest. Perhaps that is the fundamental legacy she writes about in this novel. But it is a legacy in another sense as well. It is clear that the novel is in many respects autobiographical. It is told in the first person by a girl, the youngest member of the three entwined families, born after many of the determinative events; she is recounting what she learned about the byzantine affairs, both those of family and those of Germany, that constitute a legacy for her personally and for Europe.Two modes of writing carry the story. One is expositive, and it tends to be dense, lavish, almost baroque. Nonetheless, I frequently was captivated by it. The other is dialogue, which often is presented as mere snippets of conversation. It is fast-paced, but one must constantly be alert for important details. There are occasional words, phrases, and even paragraphs in French and German. There is considerable barbed wit and much irony. There also is a fair measure of gravitas, maybe even wisdom.A LEGACY might be a great novel. To conclude that it indeed is, I would have to re-read it. Perhaps I will, should I live long enough.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. but otherwise a good quickie. It's her best book by quite a ... By Orlando Pelliccia This is well worth reading for a novelized first person biography of someone living through two world wars. She documents her life as a member of the failing upper class with more guilt than wistful fawning. There are moments of silliness, some name dropping, but otherwise a good quickie. It's her best book by quite a bit.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Bright, brittle and melancholy By johnsaturn I've never read anything by Bedford before and this has been a wonderful surprise.It's easy to see why Waugh and Mitford liked her so much - it's a fundamentally Waughian enterprise with a similarly bright, brittle and melancholy slant to the writing - occasionally indulgent but often satisfying and genuinely arresting.The novel emerges as the work of an unsentimental stylist, alive to the absurdities and tragedies of life - as well as the things that give it grace. Is it a 'Great Book'? - probably not. But it's a great novel for people who like such things - I hope more people discover it.
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