Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Sybille Bedford's latest novel walks the borderline between autobiography and fiction. It picks up where A Legacy leaves off, leading us from 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 apprenticeship to life, and of her many teachers: her father, a pleasure-loving German baron; her brilliant, beautiful, erratic English mother; and later, on the Mediterranean coast of France, the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria. Jigsaw, wrote the Sunday Times, is "the most unusual, most resonant of all Sybille Bedford's unusual and resonant books."

The tragic character in this book is the mother--one sees quickly that despite her intelligence her whole being is dependent on her ability to charm and attract men--when her second marriage goes awry the consequences are truly disastrous. The book ends abruptly at a crisis point in her mother's marriage when Bedford was 19 or 20--the reader says "But what happens next!?" I don't think there is any more--Bedford in the introduction says this is her last novel, and indeed she was in her late 80's when "Jigsaw" was published. Bedford deserves more recognition in the US--she is a premier European talent, and "Legacy" and "Jigsaw" are riveting stories.


One of the best written books which I have read   December 3, 1997
 8 out of 11 found this review helpful

This is an intelligent, highly engaging and fascinating novel. It mimics, both a travelogue and an autobiography. It leaves the reader itching to know how much of the story was based on the life experiences of the writer. The various relationships between the characters in the novel are quite unique and shocking yet entertaining. I highly recommend this novel