Jigsaw

Sybille Bedford placed the ambiguous and inescapable stuff of her own life at the center of her fiction, and in Jigsaw--her fourth and final novel, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize--she did it with particular artistry. "What I had in mind," she was later to say, "was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth...Truth here was an artistic, not moral, requirement...It involved...writing about myself, my feelings, my actions." And so she assembled the puzzle pieces of her singular past into a picture of her "unsentimental education." We learn of a childhood spent alone with her father, "a stranded man of the world" living a life of "ungenteel poverty in quite grand surroundings," a château, that is, deep in the German countryside, with wine but little else for him and his young daughter to hold body and soul together. We learn of her return to Italy and her mother, "the one