Deborah Levy

The narrator of *My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein* has her hands full. Her friend Eva’s cat has gone missing, and she fears he might have swum off into the stream of consciousness. Her other friend, Fanny, has hardly any time for her, as she works in finance and is entangled with no fewer than three lovers. And above all, it is Gertrude Stein who is making life difficult for the narrator. She is trying to write an essay about Stein, but this seems quite impossible. She knows too much and, at the same time, nothing at all about this important avant-garde thinker of the early 20th century. What she does know is this: Gertrude Stein studied psychology and medicine, but then dropped out of university; instead, in her rented flat in Paris, she curated modern art that was to shake the world; Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway were regular visitors to her home; she wrote novels, plays and poems that are incoherent yet brilliant; and she fell in love at first sight with her future wife, Alice B. Toklas. But there is so much she doesn’t know either. And so she tries to work out what we must lose in order to become modern, how we deal with fears, how we live with uncertainty and with depressing fathers, and how we build a new life for ourselves in another country. She reflects on art, language and freedom – on what all these things meant to Gertrude Stein at the beginning of the 20th century, and what they mean to her at the start of the 21st century.

AKI Verlag | Hardback | 1st edition | 160 pages | Dimensions: 21 cm x 14 cm x 1.7 cm | Language: German