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    A Favourite of the Gods
    Unavailable
    A Favourite of the Gods
    Unavailable
    A Favourite of the Gods
    Ebook337 pages4 hours

    A Favourite of the Gods

    By Sybille Bedford

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    ‘One of Britain’s most stylish and accomplished writers.’ -- Telegraph

    One autumn in the late nineteen-twenties for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France.

    Constanza and her young daughter step off a train in the French Riviera in the late 1920s without the slightest notion of where they are. But their story begins with Constanza’s parents: a beautiful New England heiress, a Roman prince and the confused catastrophe of their marriage. An idyllic childhood spent in crumbling Roman palaces, sun-baked olive groves, at sumptuous parties and being taught by the most interesting men in Rome, is changed forever by a fatal clash of culture and an impulsive decision.

    In this elegant novel, Sybille Bedford tells the story of three generations of women, of Europe and America, and the turbulence of the early twentieth century.

    This is a dramatic companion novel to A Compass Error, also published by Daunt Books.

    ‘Dazzling’ -- Bruce Chatwin

    'Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the Mediterranean, about the pleasure of food and wine.’ --Victoria Glendinning

    ‘A writer of commensurate artistry.’ -- Auberon Waugh

    ‘An excellent stylist and a splendid narrator . . . and this is a very clever work.’ -- The New Yorker

    ‘A study of the rich . . . an examination of love . . . and a statement of what Henry James either did not or would not know about the darker side of the portrait of the lady. Bedford’s mind is radiant. Her alarming economy of style burns.’ -- V. S. Pritchett

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaunt Books
    Release dateMar 16, 2011
    ISBN9781907970184
    Unavailable
    A Favourite of the Gods
    Author

    Sybille Bedford

    Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Charlottenburg, Germany, the daughter of a German father and an English mother. She grew up in Italy, France and England. The account of her travels in Mexico A Visit to Don Otavio was her first published book in 1953, and she followed it with three novels, A Legacy (1956), A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and A Compass Error (1968). Her semi-autobiographical novel, Jigsaw, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. Her memoir, Quicksands, was published in 2005. Sybille Bedford died in 2006.

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    Reviews for A Favourite of the Gods

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      A Favourite of the Gods is an unusual story. Set in the late 1920s it revolves around the impetuous action of a young woman, Costanza, as a result of losing a ring. The story then jumps back in time to Costanza’s childhood, and tells the story also of her mother Anna, an American heiress who married an Italian count. The beginning part of the novel is told from the point of view of Costanza’s daughter, Flavia, although Flavia is never a fully rounded character, only a literary device.The story does jump around, but in a sense the narrative is a lot like Costanza: impetuous, lively, outgoing, jumpy. Because there’s no real chronology it was a little hard for me to get into the book at first. But once I got used to it, the better the book got for me, because I was immediately drawn to Anna and Costanza, women who were very different and yet so similar to each other. However, I got a little bit irritated with Costanza after a while, because of her singular disinterest in other people, particularly how her actions affect others. Much more likeable was Anna, who has the strength to leave her husband, the unnamed Count, after he cheats on her (though, realistically, where could she have gone, in the late 19th/early 20th centuries?). I also wish that Flavia had been much more of a character, rather than a narrator, because I was interested to see how the patterns in the women’s lives might perpetuate themselves (or not) in the third generation.The novel’s main theme is, of course, the relationships between mothers and daughters, but it doesn’t present this theme in a sappy, sentimental way. Rather, A Favourite of the Gods depicts the highly nuanced and often complicated relationships that mothers and daughters have with each other. The novel is also about patterns: how certain patterns in people’s lives seem to repeat themselves even without consciousness of doing so. These things made the book seem all that much more rich for me.