Deborah Levy pulls off something wonderful in My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein. Her latest book, which she calls "a fiction" rather than "a novel," involves a woman struggling to write an essay about the unconventional modernist writer. What she comes up with is a delightful amalgam of a highly subjective literary biography and an urban caper in the City of Light, brightly seasoned with wit, wisdom and insightful literary criticism.
Since writing about finding her footing and voice in The Cost of Living, the second volume of her innovative "Living Autobiography" trilogy, Levy has boldly stretched and blurred the borders of literary genres to explore questions of identity and self-realization – in novels such as August Blue and The Man Who Saw Everything.
My Year in Paris actually spans just one month, November 2024. The book's nameless narrator, a successful, divorced British writer, is in Paris trying to understand Gertrude Stein's genius, how she invented herself, and her relationship with her devoted wife, Alice B. Toklas. The narrator hopes to answer the question: "What did she want words to do and what did they do for her?"
In her efforts to fathom Stein, the narrator considers the expat writer's upper-middle-class German-Jewish childhood in Pennsylvania and California, her studies under psychologist William James (brother of writer Henry) at what would become Radcliffe College (and later, Harvard), and her aborted training as a physician at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. (We're told that Stein left medical school without a degree after failing several final exams because she was "irrevocably discouraged by a misogynist professor.")
In 1903, Stein followed her older brother Leo to Paris, where, supported by family trusts, they shared an apartment in Montparnasse for 11 years. The Saturday night salons they hosted in their studio drew avant-garde writers and artists. Part of the attraction was the siblings' extraordinary collection of iconoclastic artists, including Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso.
In 1907, Stein met Alice B. Toklas and found love; she found domestic happiness when Toklas moved into her apartment in 1910. A few years later, Leo moved out, taking some of the art with him. The siblings never spoke again. Stein and Toklas remained together through two world wars, until Stein's death from stomach cancer in 1946 at the age of 72.
In addition to sampling recipes for peach brandy and gazpacho from Toklas' cookbook, Levy's narrator braves the thickets of Stein's writing. After years of rejections and obscurity, Stein had her first commercial success at age 59 with her subversive Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written by Stein and largely about herself.
The narrator repeatedly complains that Stein's prose, which unfolds in a "continuous present tense" and eschews punctuation, is repetitive and impenetrable. She backs up her criticism with well-chosen quotes. Stein, she says, "put her immense writing energies into making sure she was not understood … She did not believe it was worth having a conversation if everything is understandable." Later, she quips to a friend that Stein occasionally "risks coherence."
Stein's magnum opus, The Making of Americans, nearly does the narrator in. Like Levy, the narrator appreciates a measure of ambiguity in literature, but she complains that her life "is being ruined by Gertrude" and her "baffling and beguiling writing." She wonders, "Is this a desirable way to live? Or is it the only way to live?"
When not trudging through rain-soaked Père Lachaise Cemetery in search of Stein's grave, the narrator spends much of her time with two new, younger friends. Forty-year-old Fanny is a queer Frenchwoman, a financial manager with a "vigorous sex life" split between three lovers. Eva is a multilingual Dutch-born artist working on a graphic novel. She enjoys talking about Stein -- until her cat, who she calls "it," disappears. The plot of this book, such as it is, centers on Eva's missing cat.
My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein is essentially a search or quest story -- for "it" the cat, for understanding what made Stein great, for finding a man who will enable the narrator to be the main character in her life, for figuring out what constitutes a meaningful existence, and for the daring and courage to pursue it.
In its brainy but gleeful mix of literary history and personal exploration, Levy's new book recalls Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's charming, genre-defying pandemic novel, Dayswork (2023), in which increasingly obsessive attempts to nail down the interplay between fact and fiction in Herman Melville's work trigger some prickly questions about literary and marital devotion between a long-married couple, both writers, stuck at home during lockdown.
With My Year in Paris, Deborah Levy has produced another fresh, stimulating book about attempting to find the "there there," not just in Gertrude Stein but in life and literature.
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