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 ros), books, a writing board, and paper.Her resulting travelogue captures the rich and violent beauty of the country as itwas then.

Bedford doesnt 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 of , 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, was an immediate success, a travel book written by a novelist, as Bedford described it, establishing her reputation as a nonpareil writer.

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