{"id":529993,"date":"2026-04-14T08:48:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T08:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/529993\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T08:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T08:48:07","slug":"my-year-in-paris-with-gertrude-stein-by-deborah-levy-review-wonderfully-entertaining-deborah-levy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/529993\/","title":{"rendered":"My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy review \u2013 wonderfully entertaining | Deborah Levy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The narrator of Deborah Levy\u2019s witty scherzo of a \u201cfiction\u201d \u2013 \u201cnovel\u201d isn\u2019t the word for this uncategorisable book \u2013 thinks that Gertrude Stein<\/a> would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying a cigar together while their wives make small talk. Would Frau Freud \u201chave exchanged her recipe for boiled beef with Alice B [Toklas]\u2019s recipe for hashish fudge\u201d? The two never met (though with her interest in the \u201cbottom character\u201d and his in the \u201cunconscious\u201d, Stein and Freud would have had plenty to talk about), but that barely matters. This book is full of things that don\u2019t actually happen, of relationships that are not what the people involved suppose them to be, of digressions and fantasies and encounters that are imagined but never take place.<\/p>\n

It all starts with a lost cat. The cat is called \u201cit\u201d: lower-case \u201ci\u201d followed by lower-case \u201ct\u201d. This causes all sorts of linguistic confusion, highlighting the way we use the word \u201cit\u201d to mean something indeterminate (as in the first sentence of this paragraph), or something trivial, or something tremendous. The phrase \u201clost it\u201d recurs, the \u201cit\u201d meaning \u2013 variously \u2013 one\u2019s mind, sympathy with Ernest Hemingway, daring to be as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, the stream of consciousness \u201cflowing under the mowed and manicured golf courses on which men swung their clubs in the 21st century\u201d, the temptation to smile while being undermined by a patronising man, the drudgery of housekeeping, the thing \u2013 which might be obedience or shame \u2013 that holds an artist back from becoming a modernist \u2026 or love, or one\u2019s mother, or a black-and-white cat with one deformed ear.<\/p>\n

The book doesn\u2019t exactly have a plot, but there is a situation. Three female friends are in Paris. The narrator (English, single) is writing, or failing to write, an essay about Gertrude Stein. Eva (Spanish-Danish, married to a man in Seattle whom she sees once a week, if that, on FaceTime) is a graphic novelist. Fanny (French, polyamorous with three female lovers) is a financier.<\/p>\n

Fanny is impatient, annoyingly often on her phone at mealtimes and capable of spite. Sexy and chic, she thinks Stein\u2019s \u201cknitted woollen stocking would have been erotically catastrophic\u201d and says her \u201crepetition drives me in-saane\u201d. But she is also secretly vulnerable, wounded by her father\u2019s homophobic rejection and more invested in the three-way friendship than either of the others. When the narrator is knocked off her bicycle, it is Fanny who comes to help, having first queued for eight minutes to buy a rum baba bouchon with a slice of roasted pineapple on top. It\u2019s for the narrator \u2013 a kind thought \u2013 but Fanny explains to her that \u201cif I was dead by the time she reached [me] she would eat it herself\u201d.<\/p>\n

Eva looks angelic, and the fuss about her lost cat makes her seem childish, but it gradually dawns on the narrator, and on us, that she is actually commercially astute and emotionally cool. Her all-white apartment is exquisite and so is the fat-free food she serves. She appoints herself the narrator\u2019s assistant, says she will illustrate the Stein essay, and finally announces, without any consultation, that she will take over the project and write it herself. The reason her husband isn\u2019t there is that he is building her a house. Whatever \u201cit\u201d is for her, Eva knows how to get it.<\/p>\n

double quotation markIn P\u00e8re Lachaise cemetery, the narrator frets that however much she finds out about Stein\u2019s life, she can\u2019t get to the ‘it’ of it<\/p>\n

Suspended between these two new friends, the narrator, older and lonelier, moons around P\u00e8re Lachaise cemetery and frets that however much she finds out about Stein\u2019s life, she can\u2019t get to the \u201cit\u201d of it. Late in the book a kind of romance starts up. Hunting for the lost cat, the three women come across an eligible man of the narrator\u2019s age. He leads them for a moment into a Bu\u00f1uelesque mystery. He also has a cat with a deformed ear. What\u2019s going on here? He takes the narrator out to dinner, but this courtship is something else that fails to happen \u2013 all he wants from her is Eva\u2019s phone number.<\/p>\n

Despite the title, the action of the framing story takes place over one month, November 2024, the last month the three friends will be together in Paris, and the month of Donald Trump\u2019s re-election. The narrator watches wars on her phone, the violence interrupted onscreen by adverts for vitamins or life insurance, and IRL by the bells of Notre-Dame.<\/p>\n

Most of the time, though, her mind is in Stein\u2019s lifetime, and she carries us there with her. Levy is not competing with Stein\u2019s many biographers. She is writing a meditation, not a chronicle or an explanation. The narrator thinks that, for all her insistence on confining herself to simple words, Stein didn\u2019t \u201cbelieve in\u201d being understood. \u201cWhen I look at photographs,\u201d she writes, \u201cI cannot get into her eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Levy can, though, carry us into the Paris of Stein\u2019s era and introduce us around. She chooses her quotes astutely. Seven lines from On the Road tell us all we need to know about Jack Kerouac\u2019s vanity. A put-down from Virginia Woolf nicely punctures Walt Whitman\u2019s self-righteousness. She has a great knack for summing up a character with one detail. Of the artist Cha\u00efm Soutine: \u201ca doctor had to remove a nest of bedbugs from his ear\u201d. Of Marie Vassilieff, another artist: \u201cWhen Modigliani arrived, drunk, looking for a fight, she lifted her arms and pushed him down the stairs. Then she\u00a0carved the chicken.\u201d Of Stein: \u201cshe was so forward\u2011looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T\u201d.<\/p>\n

We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy \u2013 this is \u201ca fiction\u201d, after all \u2013 but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is \u2013 odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining \u2013 triumphantly proving her\u00a0wrong.<\/p>\n

My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah Levy is published by Hamish Hamilton (\u00a318.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The narrator of Deborah Levy\u2019s witty scherzo of a \u201cfiction\u201d \u2013 \u201cnovel\u201d isn\u2019t the word for this uncategorisable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-529993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}