Customer Reviews

Quicksands: A Memoir

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I had eagerly awaited "Quicksands," undoubtedly the last of this wonderful writer's books, given her advanced age, but sadly I was disappointed. Bedford's novels, which I have read, are autobiographical, despite her disclaimers, but I didn't realize how true to life they were until reading her memoir. Bedford lived an erratic, charmed, difficult life, part of the European artistic generation between the wars, when one could exist for long periods of time on the generosity of friends and move relatively freely from country to country. But Bedford's memoir feels removed from her life, in a way her vivid novels are not. "Jigsaw's" characters reappear--her father and mother, Oriane, Issa, Allessandro--but she observes them from afar, and they feel flat to me. She assumes the reader knows a lot already from her novels, so some incidents are briefly and cryptically covered in a way that without prior knowledge they are meaningless. An example is the story of Rosie, whose lover was a famous English jurist who secretely led a double life for many years. Bedford covers this emotional, painful, amazing story in a page and a half for the sole purpose of finally revealing the jurist's name, but without the vivid background from her novel the revelation has little impact. "Quicksands" is leading me back to the novels I haven't yet read--she's an exquisite writer. Try "Jigsaw" for the real story of this amazing woman's life.

A very good writer tells of her unconventional past in Europe, with the memories harvested mainly from the time between the two great wars. Ms. Bedford omits the retelling of many episodes covered in her previous books (none of which I have read) and assumes the reader knows more of history and twentieth century literature than is probably true of most current readers. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book and admired its many "true" sentences.