It is late 2024, and an unnamed British author living in Paris is trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer and art collector. The author has been distracted by her friend Eva’s cat, who is lost and whose name is “it” in lower case, which inevitably leads to confusion – has Eva lost her cat or her mind? (Her other friend, Fanny, has rechristened the cat Bob, to make talking about him easier.)
The Pennsylvania-born Stein was painted by Picasso, hung out with Hemingway and wrote strange, stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce embarked on his masterwork Ulysses. Commercial success didn’t come until she was in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a biography of her partner and one of her more accessible books. Our narrator is an admirer of Stein’s work, yet she can be exasperated by it. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops. [Stein] longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found.”
A blend of fiction and biography, Deborah Levy’s ninth novel is read by voice actor Kristin Atherton; her narration is cool, precise and perfectly paced. We follow the author as she goes to Père Lachaise cemetery in search of Stein’s grave and where she reflects on the lives of other literary luminaries, and on her own friendships. The Stein who emerges in this unusual and gripping portrait is fearless, innovative and, the author notes, “so forward-looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T”.
Available via Penguin, 3hr 54min
Further listening
Nonesuch
Francis Spufford, Faber, 15hr 29min
Set during the blitz, this genre-bending thriller finds Iris Hawkins, a smart young office clerk, navigating a chance encounter which propels her into a world of necromancy, time-travelling Nazis and a plot to assassinate Winston Churchill.
The Delusions
Jenni Fagan, Penguin, 8hr 19min
Fagan’s satirical novel about the afterlife centres on Edi, who works in “the largest soul terminus in existence” where she processes the newly dead and decides where they should go based on how they lived their lives. Read by the author.
