‘In one short and sly book after another, [Levy] writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both’ <\/b>Atlantic<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n
Who was Gertrude Stein?<\/p>\n
Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius – a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.<\/p>\n
And why does she matter?<\/p>\n
The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights.<\/p>\n
As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.<\/p>\n
This is a book about how we put ourselves together- an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius – a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy’s novel has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[216],"product_tag":[373,955,26830,26828],"class_list":["post-113389","product","type-product","status-publish","product_cat-fiction-hardback","product_tag-feminism-feminist-theory","product_tag-literature-history-criticism","product_tag-modern-contemporary-fiction","product_tag-narrative-theme-sense-of-place","pa_book_author-levy-deborah","pa_cover-hardback","pa_dewey-823-92-edition23","pa_edition-hardback-original","pa_imprint-hamish-hamilton","pa_language-english","pa_pages-8248","pa_publisher-hamish-hamilton","pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","first","instock","sale","taxable","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n