A Visit to Don Otavio ─ A Mexican Journey

In the mid-1940s, Sybille Bedford set off from Grand Central Station for Mexico, accompanied by her friend E., a hamper of food and drink (Virginia ham, cherries, watercress, a flute of bread, Portuguese rose), books, a writing board, and paper. Her resulting travelogue captures the rich and violent beauty of the country as it was then.
 
Bedford doesn’t so much describe Mexico as take the reader there by hand, like a small child, in second-class motor buses over thousands of miles, through arid noons and frigid nights, successions ofcomida corrida, botched excursions to the coast, conversations recorded verbatim, hilarious observations, and fascinating digressions into murky histories. At the heart of the book is the Don Otavio of the title, the travelers’ gracious host, a man of lived rather than recorded history. His hacienda at Lake Chapala is the still, Edenic center of the book, and his garrulous family and friends, what Mexico meant in terms of human experience for S. and E. Published in 1953,A Visit to Don Otavio was an immediate success, “a travel book written by a novelist,” as Bedford described it, establishing her reputation as a nonpareil writer.

Sybille Bedford (1911–2006) was born Sybille von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany, to an aristocratic German father and a partly Jewish, British-born mother. Raised variously in Germany, Italy, France, and England, she lived with her mother and Italian stepfather after her father’s death when she was seven, and was educated privately. Encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Bedford began writing fiction at the age of sixteen and went on to publish four novels, all influenced by her itinerant childhood among the European aristocracy: A Legacy (1956), A Favourite of the Gods (1963),A Compass Error (1968), and Jigsaw (1989, short-listed for the Booker Prize). She married Walter Bedford in 1935 and lived briefly in America during World War II, before returning to England. She was a prolific travel writer, the author of a two-volume biography of Huxley, and a legal journalist, covering nearly a hundred trials. In 1981 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

Bruce Chatwin (1940–1989) was a novelist, journalist, and travel writer. Born in Sheffield, Chatwin became the youngest-ever director of Sotheby’s at age twenty-five. When he was thirty-three,The Sunday Times Magazine hired him to travel and write about the subjects of his choice, and soon after he went to South America, where he stayed for the next six months and wrote his first book,In Patagonia. His 1988 novel, Utz, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.