My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy

Gertrude Stein was an American-born writer who moved to Paris in 1903, where she lived for the rest of her life. There she was friends with leading figures in modernism in art and literature, including Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Henri Matisse. 

Stein was a writer too, whose most well-known work was a book called ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’. Alice was her long-time partner and lover. By all accounts, Stein was quite a character, and her writing often confounded her readers. She became a leading figure in literary modernism, writing plays, novels, poetry and essays. She was also a collector of early twentieth-century art, and she built up a significant art collection with her brother Leo. She was Jewish and managed to survive in Nazi-Occupied Paris, supposedly because of her friendship with a Nazi collaborator.

The narrator, in this novel by Deborah Levy, is living in modern-day Paris and is there to research an essay she is writing on Gertrude Stein. She is sharing a house with Eva, who has lost her cat (named ‘it’, but later renamed Bob). Eva has a husband in America who is building her a house. Another friend is Fanny, who is flitting between three lovers.

As our narrator walks through Paris, retracing Gertrude Stein's steps, she reflects on the current state of the world, the wars and fighting underway, and how Stein lived through two world wars without seeing anything on a screen.

‘What I am thinking as the wind blows my hair around is that Stein put her immense writing energies into making sure she was not understood. This is what interested me most about her writing. She did not believe it is worth having a conversation if everything is understandable.”

There are some wonderful anecdotes of artists and writers and their past lives in Paris, woven in around the narrator’s research of Gertrude Stein’s life there and her own interactions with the friends she meets. These are interspersed with quotes from Stein’s writing. It’s like sitting down for a chat with a very knowledgeable friend. It’s also a comfortable meander around the Paris of today, and the search for a missing cat, (with one ear shorter than the other). A city with so much history, in the context of today’s world, where the US election of President Trump is about to take place and wars are still being fought.

Although this is a work of fiction, it felt like a biography and history lesson as well. The kind of book you would pick up again and again and enjoy reading slowly to make the most of the fabulous descriptions, the setting and words.

Reviewer: Rachel White

Penguin