Brilliantly realized. Bedford is by turns hilarious and ironic in the best sense: compassionate and yet clear-eyed.
Brilliant . . . Seeking further adjectives . . . I can only find the tired reviewer's standbys: original, witty, entertaining, informative, elegant, intelligent.
One of the very best novels I have ever read.
A wittily-told tale of drawing-room intrigue, political guile, and personal failure in pre-World War I Germany.
Portrays the evolution of Nazism and Fascism where it really took place--in living rooms and kitchens and on beaches.
Delightful, tart . . . [It] captures the breath of Europe past on the glass of fiction present.
As part of its effort to revive interest in the English journalist, travel writer, and biographer (of Aldous Huxley), Counterpoint plans on reprinting her four novels, beginning with this, her first, from 1956. A new and amusing introduction by Bedford records the agonizingly slow composition of the story, set in pre-WWI Germany, mostly before her own birth in 1911 in Germany. The novel's pitiable reception was redeemed by one glowing review-written by Evelyn Waugh, who no doubt would have agreed with "Kirkus "that Bedford's tale of interfaith marriage was "tantalizing." A few families-one urban and Jewish, two from the agrarian, catholic South-become "tangled" (to use "Kirkus's "words) and "the secret of an earlier, unpleasant tragedy-laden event" is revealed. A personal history seen mostly through a child's eyes, the story "twists" and "twines" and "decorates conflicts within and without a Prussian tempered era for an obliquely viewed gallery of the times." Though Bedford acknowledges the personal history involved, her debut fiction surely stands on its own fine merits.
02/23/2015
Bedford's historical account, in which two very different families are bound together by marriage, money, and tragedy in the time just before WWI, parallels her own early life. In a recently unified Germany on the brink of war, familial struggles reflect the country's precarious foundation. When Julius von Felden, a well-off man of Catholic descent with more cachet in his cultural pursuits than money to his name, meets and marries Melanie Merz, a young Jewish woman from an affluent family, their union produces a daughter and causes tension. Although their time together is short-lived—Melanie succumbs to illness, leaving behind Julius and their daughter—Julius continues to receive an allowance from the Merz family. The Feldens, French-speaking Catholic aristocrats from the south of Germany, live a rich and rural life in the country. When Johannes, one of Julius's three brothers, is shipped off to a Prussian cadet camp and runs away, causing scandal within the family, the catastrophic results are felt for years. Then a tragic accident exposes secrets and motives, causing an irreparable rift between the families. Fraught with Prussian politics and heavy-handed historical context, this is less a bildungsroman than a tale of a family adjusting to a changing country. Bedford's cool, insightful narrative style leaves her characters flat and unchanging in the face of great historical change. (Mar.)
One of the very best novels I have ever read.” —Nancy Mitford
“Dry wit, careful attendance to detail, dialogue in which there is ‘more to be said than can come through’—these are the hallmarks of Bedford’s fiction. She shows the ways in which the private lives of individuals reflect the larger political life of their culture, and vice versa; she portrays the evolution of Nazism and Fascism where it really took place—in living rooms and kitchens and on benches.” —David Leavitt
“There’s such a wonderful tension between the hedonist and the historian in this author.” —Maria Bustillos, The Awl
“A book of entirely delicious quality. Two families, vastly dissimilar, the one Jewish inartistic millionaires, the other slightly decadent Catholic aristocrats, become joined in marriage. Everything is new, cool, witty, elegant, and some scenes are uproariously funny.” —Evelyn Waugh
“A Legacy lives by its delightful tart and feline wit, and by its author’s remarkable gift for capturing the breath of Europe past on the glass of fiction present.” —Time
“At once historical novel and study of character, a collection of brilliantly objective portraits.” —Aldous Huxley
“An astonishing and fascinating first novel.” —Janet Flanner
“Bedford’s language is vibrant with an awareness of people and their manners and the countries that shape them; she moves in and out of European sensibilities with a natural ease. This reissue of A Legacy will give new readers a chance to swoon over her gracious felicities—and to come to share Bruce Chatwin’s assessment that, ‘when history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.’” —Sylvia Brownrigg
"A Legacy is a story from a vanished world, a world before the deluge, and it provides its reader with the disorienting, melancholy pleasure derived from looking at old maps. It is a sophisticated book with a cosmopolitan gloss which flatters the reader, induces a nostalgia for other people’s past: for the vanished configurations of fallen empires, and days when the dice were shaken differently, where emotions were operatic and whims well-funded, where borders were crossed with ease but countries were different from each other, where beauty was viewed not merely as a personal asset but as part of an aesthetic tradition, and where raw experience had uncertain value till it was rationally examined and filtered through the lens of high culture...For a modern reader, some of the pleasure of A Legacy may be nostalgic, but the thrust of its intention is forward. What is the legacy of the nineteenth century, how and in what manner did it transform intolerant and divided societies into societies where mass murder was practiced?" —Hilary Mantel, The New York Review of Books
“The characters are allowed to speak and see; they move about a great deal…Bedford is…interested in what they do, what they seem like to others, what they say, and what she can do to her sentences…Her genius is to make all this matter, to allow surface to suggest depth, to create excitement by playing with tone, to direct the reader toward the lives of her characters and the spirit of the age by using implication, by letting the rhythms do the work, by surprising with her diction and the texture of her prose and her dialogue. A Legacy makes clear that she is one of the finest and most original prose stylists of her age.” —Colm Tóibín, Bookforum
"[W]itty and opulently beautiful…[a] richly realized historical drama….Partly ironic, partly nostalgic, A Legacy calls to mind other novels that portray the zenith and decline of an ostentatious old order. It’s as funny as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited but mercifully free of that book’s snobbery and God-bothering. It has the tragicomic temperament of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, but its writing, skimmed of exposition and distilled to quicksilver impressions, is more enticing. The novel fuses the heft and layering of a 19th-century family chronicle with a sparkling, allusive prose style learned from modernism…A Legacy is [Bedford’s] magnum opus, and a little harmony has been restored to literature now that it’s back again in bookstores." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“The extraordinary feat of A Legacy is to be both an intimate family drama and an objective exposition of history...A Legacy is as perfect as a novel gets. It’s written with the sentence-by-sentence intensity of a short story, the narrative sweep of a history, and the tragi-comic interest of a family drama. Moreover, it is as significant as a novel gets, full of the interest of people distant from us in time and custom but recognizably human, and effortlessly illustrative of a period and society lost to us but incalculably important for the world we live in. Read it.” —Robert Minto, Open Letters Monthly
