Rena J. Mosteirin's latest book of poetry, Experiment 116, will be available October 15 from Counterpath Press. She owns Left Bank Books in Hanover and teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College.

Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy, first published in 1956 and re-released by NYRB Classics in 2015, brings to life the hot mess of bourgeois Europe just before the First World War. Drawn from her own family history, Bedford’s observations weave humor and style. Here’s an example from early in the book:

They were the lines that enclosed his nature and laid out the always repeated pattern of the coming years: the daily care spent on his person and its setting; the existence built with money, unease over money; the guards against intrusion; the trick of living in Germany as though it were a vacuum; the side-stepping of self and life through a hobby; the lack of curiosity about the human world, and the absence, so remarkable in so young a man, of the need for general human company.

And this line that comes late in the book seems to reflect not just on the story Bedford is telling, but the way she is telling the story:

Every second hand had touched a first; to every fragment there had floated up another—this phrase had been the key to the remembered look, this fib belied an earlier one, this hint illumined words once overheard, this tale resurrected the moon of a whole winter.

NYRB re-released three other Bedford books, and I’ve read them all by now, but I highly recommend A Legacy. Start there and when you need more Bedford, rest assured that her other books—mostly autobiographical fiction and one travel memoir—are excellent.

Up next week: Allie Levy of Still North Books & Bar

Previous Enthusiasms:

• Carin Pratt on Ash Davidson's Damnation Spring
• Peter Orner on Shirley Hazzard's The Evening of the Holiday