Reviews for milius, Or, a Treatise on Education

The average rating for milius, Or, a Treatise on Education based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-22 00:00:00 Kimberly Samuelson This is a great book and I’m adding it to my favorites. It’s an autobiographical novel of the youth of the British writer Sybille Bedford (1911-2006). By “autobiographical novel” I mean most of the events, people and places are true but it is fictionalized. There really isn’t a plot other than the sequence of events in her life. It’s fundamentally a story of the relationship between this young woman and her mother. As we learn in the book, while at times her mother could be loving and caring, much of the time she was simply “nucking futs.” In the review below, as I summarize her early life I am also giving away the fundamental “plot” so I should write: SPOILERS BELOW Sybille had one of the most international upbringings you can imagine. She was born in Germany near the French and Swiss borders and lived her formative years at various times in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and the UK. Her father was much older than her mother and he was loving but distant. He collected art and turned their house into a Renaissance museum. But let’s get to her mother: if Sybille grew up today, social service agencies would have a thick file on her. Her mother was never quite sure what she was supposed to do with a child. (I’m reminded of Stoner’s wife in John William’s novel of that name.) She would visit a bachelor’s apartment and leave Sybille in her baby carriage in the hallway. She would simply take off to visit and travel for weeks, leaving Sybille with strangers she met on the beach or with hotel maids. At a very young age Sybille ran away from home (by train) to live with her half-sister and husband; after a desperate search involving police, her parents said – “ok you can stay there.” Her schooling and sometimes private tutoring were sporadic --- often nobody bothered to enroll her in school. After her German father’s death, because her mother was not a German citizen, Sybille was at times a ward of the German state and her mother, then living in Italy or France, tended to ignore the thick legal packages that arrived. After her husband died, Sybille’s mother was almost engaged to two men at once; she finally chose an architect/designer 15 years her junior. As Sybille got older it seems like her mother remembered once in a while that she had a child. A letter would arrive commanding Sybille to pack up, travel by train and come to live with her mother. Sometimes the only way Sybille knew where she was going was by the postmark on the envelope (it was France). Most of the story takes place in Sanary-sur-Mer, where she ended up living on-and-off for 14 years. That small town in France was chosen because her mother and her new husband were headed for Spain but her mother tired of the train ride and decided “let’s stay here.” This was not considered part of the French Rivera in those days but it attracted artists and offbeat folks including the Aldous Huxleys, Colette, Thomas Mann, and the artist Moise Kisling and his wife Renee. Man Ray took photos of her mother. These were the people Sybille grew up with. Many of these artistic folks were avant-garde in their lifestyles – the Kislings, for example, had a ménage-a-trois going, one woman; two men. From a very early age Sybille was exposed to a world of unstable adult relationships. She writes of this instability “Was it never possible for everybody to be happy? Did anything good have to be at someone else’s expense?” Hints of Sybille’s sexual orientation began at an early age. As a young girl in Germany she received permission to invite her three best friends over for lunch “at the museum.” The cook and the maid were shocked (but not her parents) to see they were all boys! She asked permission to act as an altar boy at her local parish and did so until the bishop put a stop to it. Although some who have written about her say she was bisexual (and she did have experiences with men at an early age) in a very late-in-life interview, when asked about significant others, she only mentioned three long-term partners, all women. In the book she writes that her favorite quote is one that she memorized at a very young age: “Si on est amis, il n’y a acune difference si on fait l’amour avec.” Which she interpreted in a non-literal translation as “If it’s a friend, it’ll be all right to make love together.” She actually married a British man to obtain British citizenship. This was the 1930’s when anti-Semitism started rearing its ugly head in German and Italy and her inheritance was frozen in Germany. Since Sybille was still a German citizen and she had Jewish ancestry on her mother’s side, friends arranged for the marriage of convenience and the only result was that she dropped her German name (von Schoenebeck) and kept his name, Bedford. As an older teenager, in today’s lingo, we would say she “went clubbing” nightly, having experiences probably with both men and women. She would come home at dawn to her morphine-addicted mother, who was in despair over an affair her husband had (the one 15 years younger than her). For years Sybille was caught in a terrible position, torn between giving her mother ‘tough love’ and fighting with her to get her into rehab (paid for by their wealthy neighbors) and at other times giving in to her mother’s screaming and begging for drugs and becoming her enabler. Sybille Bedford did not write a large number of books and those were quite varied, so it’s hard to say what “type of writer” she was. Most of her writing was for newspapers and magazines. She spent many years living with her mother’s friends in London and at age 16 she regularly attended court cases as entertainment. Undoubtedly this led to her work as a trial correspondent. She covered many high-profile cases: Jack Ruby’s trial for Life magazine; the Auschwitz war crimes trials and the Lady Chatterley obscenity prosecution. She wrote a book about legal systems in various European countries, which became a textbook. She wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley. She loved food and wine and became known as a travel writer with a gastronomical flair. Perhaps her best known book is a travel book to Mexico “A Visit to Don Octavio.” In a New Yorker piece on Bedford, Joan Acocella wrote that it was the only travel book that ever made her cry. Written when she was 78, Jigsaw, nominated for the 1989 Booker, is to an extent a follow-up to her first novel, A Legacy, published in 1956. Both are the story of her relationship with her mother. I wrote a long review because I found this book fascinating; both for its writing and the story. photos top to bottom: librarything.com hotelroomsearch.com (Sanary-sur-Mer) elpais.com

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-26 00:00:00 Michael Tomscha Another one from the 1989 Booker shortlist, this lightly fictionalised autobiographical novel was my first experience of reading Bedford and a very enjoyable read. The book describes her unconventional childhood between the wars. The story starts in Germany - when her parents divorced she lived with her father in a Schloss near the French and Swiss borders - her father was a connoisseur and collector - slightly impoverished but reluctant to sell his prized possessions. When her father died she joined her mother, initially in Italy, where she was starting a relationship with the much younger Alessandro that led to an unlikely marriage. The young Sybille was a ward of a German court and as part of an agreement with her trustees it was decided that she would be educated in England, where the friends entrusted with finding a school decided to educate her themselves. Her mother and her young husband fled Mussolini's Italy and settled in the village of Sanary-sur-Mer on the South coast of France, and the rest of Sybille's childhood was spent alternating between Sanary and London. The story is evocative and full of intriguing details and joie de vivre - she mixed with some interesting people including Aldous Huxley who also settled in Sanary. Others appear pseudonymously to protect their reputations. The dominant character remains her mother whose descent into drug addiction is described in the final part of the story.