A Visit to Don Otavio

(Paperback, New edition)

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Description

Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel - through bug-infested jungle, trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish slapping against her face - she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, "one of the kindest men I ever met". She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense life of a Mexican neighbourhood.

Reviews

"An absolutely first-class writer at the top of her powers" Mark Amory

Author Bio

Sybille Bedford was born in Germany in 1911 and currently lives in London. She is perhaps best known as a novelist (Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989), but has also written extensively on the law, and wrote the authorised biography of her friend and mentor, Aldous Huxley, which Stephen Spender described as "one of the masterpieces of biography".