‘Ego v. the world’: 'Pleasures and Landscapes' by Sybille Bedford – Book Recommendation

‘[A] large part of travelling’, according to Sybille Bedford, ‘is an engagement of the ego v. the world’. Oh, how very incisive; how very true. Pleasures and Landscapes brings together eight essays written by Bedford between 1954 and 2001, taking the reader on an exhilarating literary journey to France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Denmark, and Yugoslavia. Bedford’s travel writing is evocative and deeply sensuous, her experiences detailed thick and fast. In creating the prose equivalent of camera tracking shots, she succeeds in taking you with her. This is especially true in her many descriptions of food and wine (I think it’s fair to say she was a gastronome). If you’re not hungry before reading this book, you certainly will be afterwards.

Bedford provides much food for thought too. Does her ego win out over the world, and is she guilty of presumptuous misunderstanding when, in her account of touring 1960s Yugoslavia, she expresses the view that ‘their terminology of freedom is not ours…democracy has never been a living concept in the Balkans…[n]ow that they have driven out the invaders, their intense sense of nationalism is satisfied’. There is, to say the least, much poignancy in hindsight.

Bedford’s essays are filled with hunger for experience, for nature, for art, for people, for beauty. Her writing provokes reflection on the fact that, like ourselves, the world is constantly subject to change, yet much will endure. Bedford’s final word in this collection is good counsel for any ego confronting a wider world: ‘Let us go there while we may’.

Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford ISBN: 9781907970405