Customer Reviews

A Legacy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The story takes place in the waning days of the Kaiser's rule, pre-WWI, in a society that seems to be desperately trying to avoid the instability in central Europe that finally led to the First World War. Two German families linked by an ill-fated marriage live a life that seems unimaginable to us in modern times. One Jewish, one Catholic, both wealthy, insular and largely idle, the characters spend their days moving from place to place--France, Spain, Germany, collecting art and antiques, taking air during daily carriage rides, eating what seem to be endless meals, and expecting the world to go on as it has forever. A relatively minor event--the decison to send a child to a military prep school, results in personal tragedy but also national crisis--which could only have happened in a society about to fall apart. I found this book a compelling look at a world and a society I know little about--and Bedford's prose is wonderful.

Trough the life and times of two German families at the beginning of the last century, Sybille Bedford recreates an European world lost to globalization. It was a world where each country, -each region in fact- had a particular way of seeing life, and an authentic life style. Bedford's elegant and personal prose is really original, but this book shares the spirit of Margerite Yourcenar's memories of her own ancestors. Such a beautiful and clever book!

I had read about Sybille Bedford and her writings.I know that of late there has been a revival of interest in her work. I was prepared to like this book. But I was disappointed. I will assume the problem is with me, not the book. That said, while some aspects of the place and time are well-sketched, I do not think any of the characters was well-developed. We see Jules, Clara, Sarah etc. in a number of different settings/situations over a period of several years but I did not feel that I came to know them nor did they interest me greatly. I should add that the significance of some of the main plot points completely eluded me. Without spoiling the book for those who haven't read it, I will just cite as an example a letter that is not delivered to its intended recipient. I could tell that this was intended to be one of the cruxes of the plot. However, why the character entrusted with the letter didn't deliver it and what would have happened had he done so--points I am sure the author wanted to be apparent to the reader--I could not fathom. The place and time--Germany before World War One--are of great interest to me. The situation of the Jews in the Germany of that time--a family of wealthy, totally assimilated Jews is depicted in some detail in the book--also interests me. But the novel failed to involve me emotionally--it left me cold. Nevertheless, I admire the author--she is intelligent and her prose is elegant.

Set in the significant era of late 19th early 20th century Germany, this expansive tale covers the life of two families,the Aristocratic and Catholic Felden's and the wealthy assimilated Jewish family the Merz's who become entwined through the marriage of Jules Felden to Melanie Merz. Inbetween lies the tale of Jules's brother, Johannes who is broken by the harsh Prussian military school,and the scandal that arose from his death some 30 years later that made both the Feldon's and Merz's the focus for vitriolic press attention.
The book also touches on the growing militarization of the new German state and its growing desire for empire;events that led ultimately to two world wars.
Erudite and often witty in character and social observations (although it too often-for me-goes into that most irritating of literary follies;writing whole conversations or asides in French!)I often felt a bit non plussed at times as I felt the story lacked general focus and you would suddenly read of a Leon and Robert as companions to Jules , be confused as to who these new characters are only to find they are chimpazees three pages later! The book certainly has its good points (Johannes experience,descriptions of a bygone era heading for disaster)but overall I found it a little unsatifying.
Lauded by such luminaries as Waugh and Huxley,(so whom am I to criticise?!) I think maybe the fact that I have read so many powerful accounts of this era, 'The Legacy' lacked the freshness it must have had when it first appeared in the mid 1950's.

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]