Kill Fee

From A Legacy:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks. La vie, voyez-vous, ça n’est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu’on croit. Never as bad, never as good… When? At the instant of calamity, at the edge of fear? when the bad news is brought, and the trap felt sprung, or the loss strikes home? At low ebb, in tedium, in accidie? In the moments of renewal? the transfiguration of love, the flush of work, the grace of a new vision, the long-held now? Or later, when the doors shut, one after another, and regret moves in the heart like a steel coil? Never as good, never as bad, but a drab bearable half-sleep banked by a little store of this and that, subsiding after visitations and alarms, a drowsing, often not uneasy, down the years, an even-paced irreversible passage–life, the run of lives, the sum of life? Is it consoling? is it the whole truth? Is it inevitable?

“The world she was born into and the one she left shouldn’t have fit into the same lifetime,” writes Paul.

An interview
Sybille Bedford: Secret history

Obituaries
A novelist searching for truth among social elites and courtroom dramas (Guardian)

Cosmopolitan writer who drew upon her own experiences to chronicle the lives of loosely fictionalised prewar aristocracy (Times)

Author of ‘A Legacy’ whose novels examined the relationship between freedom and fate (The Independent)

Sybille Bedford, who died on February 17 aged 94, became one of Britain’s most stylish and accomplished writers, despite having been born and brought up in Germany. (Telegraph)

Hilary Mantel’s reviews
(The first two links are to the New York Review of Books online archive, meaning you have to pay three dollars for each. Still, money well spent. The third link to the Spectactor may require registration, but it’s free.)

Before the Deluge, review of A Legacy

A Past Recaptured, reviews of A Favourite of the Gods, A Compass Error, and Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

The last of the vintage wine, review of Quicksands: A Memoir

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Literary, Obituaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.