A Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

In this sequel to The Favourite of the Gods, seventeen-year-old Flavia, on her own in the south of France in the late 1930s, lives with the confidence and ardor of youth. She knows her destiny-it lies at Oxford, where she will begin a great career of public service. But this view of herself is at odds with reality; it springs from ideas she has of her idolized English father and of her blessed Italian mother, Constanza. Only when she is caught up in an intrigue that is to determine the fate of those she most loves does she begins to discover her own true nature-even as she loses the bearings of her moral compass.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, LGBT, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Queer, Literature

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Sybille Bedford, OBE (16 March 1911 – 17 February 2006) was a German-born English writer. Many of her works are partly autobiographical. Julia Neuberger proclaimed her "the finest woman writer of the 20th century" while Bruce Chatwin saw her as "one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose.

Works

The Sudden View: a Mexican Journey - 1953 - (republished as A Visit to Don Otavio: a Traveller's Tale from Mexico, a travelogue)
A Legacy: A Novel - 1956 - her first novel, a work inspired by the early life of the author's father, which focuses on the brutality and anti-Semitism in the cadet schools of the German officer class.
The Best We Can Do: (The Trial of Dr Adams) - 1958 - an account of the murder trial of suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams
The Faces of Justice: A Traveller's report - 1961 - a description of the legal systems of England, Germany, Switzerland, and France.
A Favourite of the Gods - 1963 - a novel about an American heiress who marries a Roman Prince
A Compass Error - 1968 - a sequel to the above, describing the love affairs of the granddaughter of that work's protagonist
Aldous Huxley: A biography - 1973 - the standard, authorized biography of Huxley
Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education - 1989 - a sort of followup to A Legacy, this novel was inspired by the author's experiences living in Italy and France with her mother
As It Was: Pleasures, Landscapes and Justice - 1990 - a collection of magazine pieces on various trials, including the censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the trial of Jack Ruby, and the Auschwitz trial, as well as pieces on food and travel.
Pleasures and Landscapes: A Traveller's Tales from Europe - a reissue of the above, removing the legal writings, and including two additional travel essays.
Quicksands: A Memoir - 2005 - A memoir of the author's life, from her childhood in Berlin to her experiences in postwar Europe.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Deceived by the fulsome odes of some New Yorker critic, I took myself to the local used bookstore more than a decade ago and bought four of Bedford's novels. Three down. I loathe this author. If anything, A Compass Error is worse than A Favourite of the Gods, whose plot it continues. But read it if you like pretentious writing and lesbian coming-of-age.

The plot itself, especially the twist at the end, is moderately intriguing and it would have been nice to read this novel if it had been written by, say, Edith Wharton.

Not that it really matters, but no one can agree on when the story is set. (The plot covers two months in a summer in the south of France.) Brenda Wineapple on the back cover says it's the early 1930s. The Goodreads description says it's the late 1930s. The author herself in an introduction incorrectly states it's the late 1920s. I will settle it once and for all - Flavia's parents get married in 1914 and she is born within a year or two, so say 1915. In the novel she is 17, which puts us at around 1932. Someone refers to "that odious man" (or similar language) in Germany, which they would not do unless he were already Chancellor, so it's 1933.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Compass Error (1968), sequel to A Favourite of the Gods (1963), is a brilliant novel marred by a single, bizarre blemish. Flavia, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, is asked by a lover about her family; she proceeds to deliver a fifty-page monologue amounting to a thorough précis of the earlier novel. Somehow this teenager has access to all the secret facts and subtle shading of her mother’s and grandmother’s marriages, despite little evidence that those women shared any of this information with her. There are no blind-spots, no areas of ignorance or misinterpretation, no self-serving slant, such as might situate Flavia as a very young person relating events and emotions experienced by other people decades before her birth or coming to consciousness; no, she simply recites a poised and omnisciently sensitive account of her family legacy. An adult Flavia is the author of A Favourite of the Gods; but it is ridiculous of Bedford to pretend that Flavia has an outline of that book complete in her head and ready to relate, at seventeen. (That her lover dozes off is the sole concession to realism.) Even weirder, the monologue finished, Flavia reverts to a convincing teenager; indeed the entire plot hinges on her being youthfully headstrong and unwise, brilliant but naïve, a sexual novice among veteran libertines. The thing needn’t have been included.

In the introduction to the 2000 Counterpoint reissue, Bedford brave-facedly denies the monologue is a “summary,” rather a “compressed repetition,” “the same subject taken in a different light and on another scale,” “as painters allow themselves to do.” Nonsense - and I think Bedford knew its inclusion was an artistic mistake, because she did things differently in Jigsaw (1989), another sequel or companion, following A Legacy (1956). Jigsaw’s narrator, another precocious teenager absorbed by love and letters while living in the south of France with a distinguished and complicated middle-aged mother, has no omniscient retrospective reach, forms ideas about her parents using only what she can personally remember, overhear and observe. Should you read Jigsaw first, as I did, you will encounter the mother fresh in A Legacy - a different person, distinctly a younger woman.

But enough complaining! Bedford is a master, and A Compass Error has everything I like about her style. Her fierce economy, her piquant verve. The sensuality of her landscapes, interiors, and meals. Her dialogue is superb, turmoil and artifice in a perfect balance, having what Richard Howard, writing of Yourcenar’s early work, calls an “aphoristic glamour.” Her characters are unforgettable, I daresay with but a day’s distance from this reading; among them are the stodgy but easily manipulated Rosette Fournier; Constanza and Michel, specimens of a sophisticated and worldly-wise but also stoutly principled and public-spirited liberal intelligentsia; Thérèse Loulou, whom I pictured as a Mesoamerican Marlene Dietrich, or Lartigue's Renée Perle, or Helena Christensen by Peter Lindbergh; and the various, ever-adroit Madame Devaux, a smoothly wicked witch. Bedford wrote in English, lived many years and finally died in England; but this is a French novel. Appropriately in Flavia’s first lover’s living room discussions of Les Liaisons dangereuses take place under a “long row of Colette.”

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am rather glad that I had a little break after reading A Favourite of the Gods before reading this, as in the first third of the novel there is a fairly lengthy re-hashing of the events in the previous novel, as Flavia recounts the events of her mother’s and grandmother’s lives . This serves as a useful explanation to any readers who have not read ‘A Favourite of the Gods’, but which I may have found a bit dull, had I read this novel straight after. As it was, although I had read ‘A favourite of the Gods’ very recently I did quite appreciate the chance to re-engage with the events of that novel, I also rather liked having Flavia’s own spin put upon those events.
“There she went. A foolish girl, a brave girl, a single human creature in first pride of its unique existence. Ignorant, as we are all of us, in youth, in health, untried, taking possession of the world, ignorant of its workings and that of our own natures, ignorant, arrogant, generous, self-enclosed, yet visited, however briefly, by a flash of intellectual passion.”
In ‘A Compass Error’ we again meet Flavia, seventeen and living alone in a costal Provencal village, cramming for her Oxford entrance. Here she lives a seemingly charmed and independent life, relatively wealthy, swimming daily and eating alone in harbour restaurants. Flavia is a sensible, conscientious young lady, remarkably unscathed from her chaotic upbringing by Constanza who we met fully in ‘A Favourite of the Gods’ – but who remains only a background presence in this novel.:
“On the night of the fireworks, as Flavia was about to finish her Coeur-crème, a party of seven or eight swept Chez Auguste : They looked like strangers, indeed strange birds, in the place but they made themselves at home calling for tables to be put together, calling for olives, wine and bread, shouting enquires about the progress of their bouillabaisse. All were sunburnt and the men wore the same kind of clothes that Flavia wore with the northern town- dwellers delight in summer ease; and so with some ornamental touches did the women. They were painters, literary journalists and painters’ wives. Flavia, who thought that she could put a name to one or two of them looked and listened.”
Long hot summer days and a gruelling study timetable don’t prevent Flavia from making new friends, and a chance meeting with Therese the wife of famous painter draws Flavia into a circle of Bohemian characters. Flavia’s attention is distracted from her studies with a heady combination of long dinner parties, drinking and sex. Therese takes an interest in Flavia who is instantly attracted to Therese. Soon after, Flavia meets and is over awed by Andree – a vicious, conniving beauty who takes full advantage of Flavia’s naivety. Drawn into a fully adult and sexually experimental world, Flavia is unprepared for the lessons she will learn. Decisions that Flavia make are destined to impact terribly on both her and her absent mother.
In A Compass Error, Sybille Bedford explores the cost of a terrible mistake. A coming of age novel it charts the dangerous territory that can exist between the teenage world and the dark adult world that seems so enticing.
Sybille Bedford’s writing is really lovely, there is nothing wasted, it is intelligent and enormously evocative. A sublime sense of place which stays with the reader long after the book is laid aside, is no doubt why Daunt Books – known best for their travel books have chosen to re-issue it. Of the two novels, I liked A Favourite of the Gods best, Constanza’s story is just brilliant, and marvellously well told, but A Compass Error is just as memorable, and an absolute must read for anyone who has read and enjoyed the earlier book.

[Baz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1969, this queer love story between two women is the original Call Me By Your Name – though not – I’m sure they’re quite different. The young, intelligent, headstrong Flavia, a passionate sensualist and gourmet, falls in love with an older woman, the mysterious, disenchanted, difficult Andreé. Set against the backdrop of a beautiful coastal village in the south of France, this is more than a coming-of-age, coming-into-love story. It’s a story about all that’s charming in a privileged life, and all that isn’t. It’s a multi-generational story about inheritance and legacy, about Europe in that period between wars in the early twentieth century, about cultural dissonances, identity, youth and illusion, bohemians and artists, the dominance of the bourgeois and what their dominance in society means for people who just want to be themselves, follow their instincts, uninhibitedly. This is a charmed world, full of art and beauty and good food and wine and high-minded preoccupations. So don’t read this if you’re a certain kind of woke person militant about avoiding certain “privileged people stories”. You might not get along... But what a lovely escape it was! Bedford is a sophisticated writer and it’s her worldliness that elevates this story for me. Her prose is lucid and stylish, and her natural elegance negates the necessity for lyricism. This book is a kind of sequel to A Favourite of the Gods, and I didn’t love it as much only because about a quarter of it is taken up recounting its plot (because it’s crucial to the story here). I would definitely recommend A Favourite of the Gods first. It’s the perfect novel if you want to leave your isolation and live somewhere gorgeous for a while. It’s highly evocative.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What starts out seeming like a piece of well-made wish-fulfillment (it's about a very clever, very pretty, rather rich young girl having saucy adventures in the south of France) turns out to carry quite a sting in its tail for anyone who has ever -- ignorantly but no more forgivably for that -- made a truly destructive mistake.

[Kiely · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That /was/ the performance."

Kiely Stop Reading Mid-Century Coming-Of-Age Novels Set On The French Riviera Challenge

lmao jk, I'll never stop — although it /was/ interesting to read this one like a month after reading Pamela Frankau's A WREATH FOR THE ENEMY! I am glad I read this book, although it was definitely a bit wild and out there at times! I thought that the book's notions of inherited family trauma were interesting and definitely true to an extent — I am who I am because of things that my mother and grandmother went through, but I also haven't internalized those things to the point where I can relate these events like I was there or like they happened to me! A frequent complaint about this book is about the 50-page-long digression (in a 200-page-long book) where Flavia tells the entire story of her mother and grandmother's lives in unbroken exposition to someone (who is literally SLEEPING and DOESN'T UNDERSTAND ENGLISH) in an attempt to get readers up to speed with what happened in the first book about Flavia's mom (which I haven't read, and now feel no desire to ever read :-)). I'd argue that this backstory was way too long and could have been summed up in like 10 pages, but the sheer LENGTH of this exposition does sort of drive home the fact that Flavia really does feel like she's not her own person, she's just living out the lives of her maternal figures all over again and can't ever escape them, but in a brave new world in the run-up to World War II.

I thought it was compelling that Flavia is probably a lesbian (and written by lesbian icon Sybille Bedford herself), which I'll admit is basically why I wanted to read this book at all, lmao. However, whenever she tries to tell anyone (at the age of 17) that she's pretty sure she knows what her preferences are, everyone freaks out and says there's no way that she can know so surely at this point, that one day she'll "change her mind and meet a nice man," which... uhhh...!!! Doesn't sit well with me!!! On the one hand this book is very forward-thinking, what with Flavia's first lover Therese being married to a man but habitually sleeping with all of her friends (bisexual icon!!) but Therese also saying basically "you have to marry a man if you're a woman" :-( Accurate to the 1930s, but still pisses me off! Also, the Femme Fatale of the book is also very mean to Flavia about her sexual identity and uses it against her, as well as insulting her, a 17-year-old whose brain has not yet fully developed, to an astonishing degree, and that's all I'll say about that because the shock factor relating to her sections was half of the fun of reading this book!!

The whole point of this book is kind of that Flavia made a mistake when she was 17 that messed up her mother's life, which she feels the effects of for the rest of her own life. Kind of like Ian MacEwan's ATONEMENT, actually, although I'd argue that what Briony did in that book was way worse! Also, Briony in ATONEMENT made her decision out of complete malice, while Flavia in this book was TRICKED and her sexual preferences were EXPLOITED! I think Flavia needed to let herself off the hook at a certain point, but alas, we cannot talk sense into fiction characters. In the end, Bedford tries to swerve the topic of this book back to history — to how it feels to live through it, how we never know what's ahead, how what has come before us impacts our own lives. Those are important points, but there don't really seem to be many conclusions. At the same time, this book is also very much lifestyle #goals of living a shabby-chic existence on the "lesser" end of the French Riviera and a 17-year-old girl loving wine and falling in love with an older woman and going to parties every night and wanting an academic life so badly that she somehow stumbles into a bit of a dark academia predicament (although I wouldn't ever call this book "dark academia" lmao). This was very interesting, and I enjoyed it!

"The failure of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?"

[Ian Mond]

It’s rare that a novel recommended by Backlisted doesn’t knock it out of the park. But I wasn’t all that fond of A Compass Error. I admired parts of it and even loved several intense scenes toward the climax (including the main reveal), but I found most of it to be a bit of a slog.

The novel, a sequel to A Favourite of the Gods (not that you need to read that novel for reasons I’ll come to), centres on seventeen-year-old Flavia living alone for the first time in the South of France (as you do when you have a fuck tonne of cash). Flavia dreams of attending Oxford, becoming a public servant, and one day being lauded as a great writer.* Between her studies, she falls in love with Thérèse, the wife of a famous painter, and then the sophisticated Andrée. It’s with Andrée that Flavia’s loyalty to her family is tested.

Even for a coming-of-age story, Flavia is too passive, too easily swayed to be of much interest. It’s not just that she’s emotionally naive—that goes without saying—it’s that she’s too led by the opinion of others, especially her two lovers, Thérèse and Andrée, who manipulate the bejesus out of her. The blame can be laid on her upbringing. Having not read A Favourite of the Gods, it’s still clear that Flavia’s mother, Constanza, is the sort of person who sucks the oxygen out of the room—everything is about her and only her. In a sense, it’s a wonder that Flavia has any personality.

The endless section where Flavia provides a detailed account of her family to Thérèse hints that even Bedford wasn’t all that interested in her teenage protagonist. Having not read A Favourite of Gods, I can only assume Flavia is recapping that novel's more interesting and chewy events. I appreciate why Bedford does this. The climax makes no sense if you don’t know the context—and Bedford couldn’t be sure that people had read the previous book—but my God, it goes on forever. It kills the momentum of A Compass Error stone dead.**

If you can get past the info dump, the novel's second half is terrific. Astounding even. I won’t say too much for those who intend to pick this up, but Andrée’s treatment of Flavia is…let’s just say I ended up feeling sorry for the poor girl. (Bedford also handles the big reveal with a great deal of aplomb).

As a queer novel, I’m not sure how revelatory or provocative it is/was. It might have ruffled some feathers, but it’s not explicit, and Flavia’s relationship with Thérèse and Andrée lacks chemistry. But honestly, what the fuck would I know.

The ending of A Compass Error is great. You just have to make it there.

*A dream she realises. We’re introduced to middle-aged Flavia at the novel's start, and she’s quite the famed author.

**Not to beat a dead horse, but I get the gut punch of Andree’s identity only lands if we know all about Flavia’s Mum, Costanza—her fractious relationship with her mother, the intensity of her marriage to Flavia’s now dead father, and the affair with Michel. But there had to be a more elegant way of achieving this. Clearly, Bedford knew it wasn’t much chop, given she spends a chunk of the A Compass Error’s introduction explaining why she did it. I was not convinced.

[Kitty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed Sybille Bedford's autobiographical 'Quicksands' and her biography of Aldous Huxley so was keen to try a novel... But though I got through this quickly and avidly I ultimately found the story unsatisfactory and rather strange. Perhaps it has dated slightly; the premise of a schoolgirl on her own in the South of France in the early 1930s who falls for an older woman and is manipulated into revealing a secret (I don't want to reveal the only 'twist' in the tale) is not as shocking as it might have been once, and most of the characters seem strangely absent, their backgrounds sketched in two-dimensionally. I never really understood the forces or emotions driving them. It reads like an odd little interlude in a girl's life when it should have been an emotional 'coming-of-age' turning point. The last few pages briefly sum up what happened to the characters in the years that followed, which is slightly deflating. But in a certain way it was an interesting glimpse of expat lives in that strange interwar period when everything was changing, especially social mores.

[Michael Goodine · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A Compass Error" comes at roughly the mid-point of Bedford's bibliography, between "A Favorite of the Gods" (decent) and "Jigsaw" (superb).

This might the weakest of Bedford's major works. Her prose style is still intoxicating, but the story itself isn't as good as her others. And surely this book could have been written without a hundred page recap of her previous novel.

I suspect readers in the 1960s felt otherwise, but nowadays the antagonist of "A Compass Error" comes off as a bit of a caricature. A bit stereotypical.

On the plus side, Bedford was able to have the LGBT themes out in the open, in contrast to how they had to be only alluded to (and very slightly, at that) in "A Legacy" just a dozen years before.

Anyway, Bedford was one of the very best English writers... so even her worst works come highly recommended.

[Priscilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

A completion of the story begun in Favourite of the Gods. I enjoyed the character study of an unusual young person who is trying to negotiate adult life ahead, with a twist of a cruel and caustic revelation of an outsiders view of her toward the end of the story. This is something I have rarely seen described and although most of us don't have one encounter in which all our adolescent faults are starkly revealed to us, we do (or at least, I did) have little moments of self-recognition in the reactions of others. These are odd books, but I enjoyed them.

[Jed Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is much to admire in this sequel to the marvelous and moving "Favorite of the Gods," particularly in its exploration of the psychology of a young girl as she unwittingly works her own, and family's, doom, but despite its brevity, Bedford somehow felt the need to use fifty of its scarce pages summarizing the events of the prior novel: a waste, rather, as otherwise the two make for a quite an amazing minor epic.

[Minne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to read this again, but once I've read the first book because this is a sequel.
Also this is 90% autobiographical from my understanding, what a dream.
I liked the book... I don't like the person who made me read it.
It's all about the accidents of time and place and the naivety that comes with 'coming of age'.
Bedford writes very idyllic and aesthetic but it's not something you want to read 5 minutes before your eyes decide to shut off for the day.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

An unpleasant book which consists of characters speaking to each other in an affected way, a fifty page info dump about the main character's grandmother and mother, and tedious monologues from a narcissist.

[Donna Wessel Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Besutifully written, heartbreaking. But there were problems with the protagonist, and not primarily the much-discussed question of "how could she not have known?". The ending devolves into summation, not even telling, much less showing. Mais le style!

[Tommie · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I think my opinion was substantially influenced by having just read the prequel, and then having to plod through a very long 'in case you missed it' of the previous book, only to terminate in a kind of Disney villianous that felt entirely out of place.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book seemed like a lot of repetition of A Favourite of the Gods. But it becomes deeply suspenseful. I really wanted to find out what happened. I became angry at two of the characters and felt empathy for Flavia, the protagonist.

[RD Chiriboga Moncayo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing sequel but it does have a striking, amusing villainess.

[Liz Goodacre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obsessed with this book and its predecessor. What astonishing complex story telling.

[Mary Dubberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This and A Favourite of the Gods are the Sybille Bedford books I return to most often. [NB the 2011 Daunt Books editions are the loveliest and best!]

[Kealan O'ver · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like an epilogue and an unnecessary sequel to the first book. Felt a little pointless and unsatisfying but gets an extra star for the bravery of some of its themes.

[Squeak2017 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bedford produces beautifully evocative prose without appearing overdone or pretentious. At the same time, it is clear that the narrative voice is a youngster who is outplayed by the scheming adults around her. Flavia acts in good faith but she is used and manipulated, entrapped by her own desires into giving away what she most wanted to keep hidden. What was most disturbing was the shocking end to one of the characters, the brutality intensified by the casual reporting of it, which closed the novel. This work haunted me for some time.

[Cera · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very well-written book that takes the characters I loved from A Favourite of the Gods and puts them through hell for no reason I can understand. If there was a catharsis, or the sense that after the horribleness people grew, changed, learned, then it would all have been worthwhile, even if there wasn't anything like a 'happy' ending. But the book builds up to a horrible thing, and then the horrible thing happens, and then there is incredibly excruciating recrimination phase filled with emotional abuse, and then it's over, people's lives are permanently screwed up and that is that.

The spoiler:

I think we're supposed to see some hint of ... I don't want to say redemption, but relief? in the fact that Flavia never told Andree about writing and does eventually manage to become a writer. But ugh. I am sure that there are people who make mistakes at 18 and whose lives are still shaped by it at 50, but if one details misery just to explore the horror of it and then stops I'm not sure I see that as life-affirming fiction, and life-affirming is what I *want* out of my fiction.

Upon reflection, it also really bothers me that Flavia's error was to be seduced by a woman. If she'd been seduced by a much-older man who was taking advantage of her would it still be framed as "she made a horrible mistake which messed up her life" or would she be seen as an innocent victim? There's a hint to me that Bedford feels Flavia's wrongness is tied up in her lesbianism.

[Vel Veeter]

The second of the two books A Compass Error, is a kind of reflective take on the first book. Instead of just simply retelling or continuing the story, the focus is on the youngest daughter of all the generations now looking back over her life. Both as an interview and a potential book, Flavia is trying to make sense of her young adulthood, her mother, her family, and their shared history together as she writes about them.

I thought that the kind of weird carnivalesque nature and tone of the first book is completely subdued in a really good way in this second book. It doesn’t change anything that happens in the first one, nor does it rewrite its history. Instead what this book does is take a sober look at what came before. In some ways it’s a reflection of England between the wars, the effect of mixed heritage on one’s identity, and trying to find stability after an obviously unstable childhood. The sobering up of the story makes a lot of sense when it comes down to it. This book is a strong continuation of this story because its not just a sequel so much as a successor. In this sense, this book is/conflates the same experience between a writer’s look on their past creation and a child’s trying to make sense of a childhood without bounds. I am glad I read these books and more so I am really glad I read them together, separated only by a few days.

[Mely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat better than Favourite of the Gods, to which it is a sequel. Young Flavia spends a summer alone in the French countryside and falls in love with first a painter's wife and then a dangerous and unsuitable beauty. Flavia's sophomoric certainties are painfully apt, but like its predecessor this book's attempts to speak elliptically of its center only end up leaving one feeling empty. You can tell by the end that Flavia's relationships with Constanza and Anna are supposed to be the subtext of her relationships with Therese and Andree, but Constanza and Anna never come quite clear.

I also found the villain--and there is a villain--profoundly unconvincing.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written, finely detailed short novel set primarily in the first decades of the twentieth century. The young protagonist is appealing in her earnest desire to make something of herself while, at the same time, trying to find a moral compass to follow in her life. The descriptions of the varied European locations and time periods are vivid without trying too hard to be colorful. A very engaging book that I enjoyed from beginning to end.

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, and its follow-ups A Favorite of the Gods and The Legacy. Bedford calls these novels but they read to me like lightly draped memoirs. Highly intelligent and a bit subversive beautiful young girl in extraordinary circumstances gets drawn into twists of older/wiser/more corrupt adult life. Great coming of age and big picture (of emotional growth) book.

[Sara Moorehead · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about a girl/woman in a time and place different from today - but very real. It is strange and delightful. Completely surprising. I found it worth every page. Sadly, not a very satisfying ending... but it's all about the journey, right?

[Kristina Silverbears · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried and I just couldn't finish this book. By page two hundred, when I still didn't know what the book was about, I put it down. I never felt that she was working toward anything, or had a purpose. And that (nearly) 100 page diversion certainly did not help things.

[Carey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know I seem wildly out of step with other reviews but I thought this was "Pretentious rubbish ...."

[Bettie]

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...