Review of “My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein” by Deborah Levy – Wonderfully Entertaining | Deborah Levy

TThe narrator of Deborah Levy’s clever story of “fiction”—”fiction” is not the right word for this uncategorizable book—believes that Gertrude Stein would have loved Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying cigars together while their wives make small talk. Could Frau Freud have exchanged her recipe for boiled beef with Alice B [Toklas]“Hashish candy recipe”? They never met (although, with her interest in the “underpersonality” and his interest in the “unconscious,” Stein and Freud had much to talk about), but that hardly mattered. This book is full of things that don’t actually happen, of relationships that are not what the people involved assume, of digressions, fantasies, and encounters that are imagined but never happen.

It all starts with a lost cat. The cat is called “it”: a lowercase “i” followed by a lowercase “t.” This causes all sorts of linguistic confusion, highlighting the way we use the word “it” to mean something indefinite (as in the first sentence of this paragraph), something trivial, or something enormous. The phrase “lost it”, the meaning of “it” recurs – variously – one’s mind, the sympathy for Ernest Hemingway, the audacity to be as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, the stream of consciousness “that flows beneath the manicured and manicured golf courses on which men used to play their clubs in the twenty-first century”, the temptation to smile while being undermined by an arrogant man, the drudgery of housekeeping, the thing – which may be either obedience or shame – that prevents the artist from becoming a modernist…or love, Or the mother, or a black and white cat with one deformed ear.

The book doesn’t exactly have a plot, but there is a situation. Three girlfriends in Paris. The narrator (English, solo) is writing, or failing to write, an article about Gertrude Stein. Eva (Spanish-Danish, married to a man in Seattle who she sees once a week, if that, on FaceTime) is a graphic novelist. Fanny (French, polygamist with three lovers) is a financier.

Fanny is impatient, often talks annoyingly on her phone at mealtimes and is capable of spite. Sexy and elegant, she thinks “Stein’s knitted wool stocking would be an erotic disaster” and says that “the repetition of it drives me crazy.” But she’s also secretly vulnerable, plagued by her father’s homophobic disapproval, and more interested in a three-way friendship than any of the others. When the narrator is knocked off her bike, Fanny comes to help, having stood in line for eight minutes to buy a baba rum. Bouchon With a slice of toasted pineapple on top. It’s the narrator’s—a good idea—but Fanny explains to her that “if you’re dead by the time you get there [me] She’ll eat it herself.”

Eva seems angelic, and the fuss over her missing cat makes her seem childish, but it gradually becomes clear to the narrator, and to us, that she is actually commercially astute and emotionally cold. Her all-white apartment is gorgeous and so is the lean food she serves. She appointed herself assistant narrator, said she would illustrate Stine’s essay, and finally announced, without any consultation, that she would take on the project and write it herself. The reason her husband is not there is because he is building a house for her. Whatever it is for her, Eva knows how to get it.

Suspended between these two new friends, the narrator, older and more isolated, wanders around the Père Lachaise cemetery and worries that no matter how much she discovers about Stein’s life, she can’t get ‘it’ out of her. Late in the book a kind of romance begins. While searching for the missing cat, the three women encounter an eligible man about the narrator’s age. It leads them momentarily into a Buñuelesque mystery. He also has a cat with deformed ears. What’s going on here? He takes the narrator out to dinner, but this engagement is something else that didn’t happen – all he wants from her is Eva’s phone number.

Despite the title, the framing story takes place over the course of one month, November 2024, the last month the three friends will be together in Paris, and the month of Donald Trump’s re-election. The narrator watches wars on her phone, the violence on screen interrupted by vitamin or life insurance ads, and IRL by the bells of Notre Dame.

Most of the time, however, her mind is on Stein’s life, and she carries us there with her. Levy does not compete with many of Stein’s biographers. She is writing a meditation, not a chronicle or an explanation. The narrator believes that, despite her insistence on confining herself to simple words, Stein did not “believe” she could understand them. “When I look at the pictures, I can’t get into her eyes,” she wrote.

However, Levy can carry us to Stein’s Paris and introduce us everywhere. She chooses her quotes intelligently. Seven lines from On the Road tell us everything we need to know about Jack Kerouac’s ego. The insult from Virginia Woolf nicely punctures Walt Whitman’s sincerity. She has a great talent for summarizing a character with one detail. About the artist Chaim Soutine: “The doctor had to remove a bedbug nest from his ear.” And about Marie Vasiliev, another artist: “When Modigliani arrived, drunk, looking for a fight, she raised her arms and pushed him down the stairs. Then she sculpted the chicken.” About Stein: “She was so forward-looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T.”

We shouldn’t assume that the narrator is Levy—this is “fiction,” after all—but we can be sure of one thing. Eva may declare that an essay on Stein will never be written, but here he is—strange, inventive, and wonderfully entertaining—triumphantly proving her wrong.