Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

This book is the fourth and final chunk of the first volume of the Library of America edition of Gertrude Stein's writings (I didn't re-read the second chunk, Three Lives). It's a very strange book: although it purports to be an autobiography, Stein has written it (as she admits in the very last sentence, comparing herself to Defoe). It's especially strange as Stein always refers to herself as Gertrude Stein. The book covers the relationship between Stein and Toklas obliquely rather than explicitly (in the book, Stein ventriloquizes Toklas as saying she sits with the wives of geniuses), and shows Toklas as the person who takes care of all the pesky, bureaucratic things that Stein would rather not bother with. I was particularly interested in the account of their work driving an ambulance during World War I, and her description of post-war Paris (full of artistic American expatriates). This book is less experimental on the level of the sentence than Three Lives and many of the writings collected in the third part of this volume.

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