My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Deborah Levy’s latest genre-defying novel. It is at once a compelling contemporary fiction and an extended meditation on the importance of Stein, who Levy describes as the godmother of modernism, a queer icon, a self-declared genius and a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.
The structure of Levy’s novel artfully embraces many of Stein’s concerns. Stein was an artist fascinated by methods of making, as shown in her magnum opus, The Making of Americans (1925). Levy embraces this approach, constructing a novel in which her protagonist is continually composing her essay on Stein, as she debates Stein’s works with her friends, recreates recipes from the cookbook of the American writer and Stein’s life partner, Alice B Toklas, and retraces the paths that Stein and Toklas followed around Paris. The form of the novel evolves as Levy’s characters are continually composing their thoughts and composing themselves.
Stein is thought to have coined the term “The Lost Generation” to describe the community of expatriate writers who made Paris their home in the early 20th century. Levy’s characters are similarly exiled from their homes; their lives split in important ways. Eva is an artist who has travelled to Paris to finish a graphic novel, leaving her husband in Toronto, Canada. They speak once a week. Fanny is a sexually adventurous financier from Paris attempting to conduct many simultaneous lives. Together they are searching for Eva’s missing cat.
