How does one define home and family? Or, as a character in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy's ingenious meld of fact and fiction, puts it: How should people "put ourselves together?" A cigar-smoking lesbian in a queer-unfriendly era, Stein has fascinated readers, including the unnamed narrator of this book, with the life she defined for herself. The narrator, a writer from England, has come to Paris to research an essay on Stein but struggles with the process. Two friends ameliorate her situation. One is Eva, a woman from Copenhagen at work on a graphic novel. The other is Fanny, a Frenchwoman with three female lovers. The 2024 U.S. elections loom, as does a smaller problem: Eva's cat, one ear shorter than the other, has disappeared.
Levy's inspired touch is to alternate fictional scenes with biographical information about Stein. She packs a lot into this slender book: Stein's birth in Allegheny, Pa., in 1874; her time as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University; her 1903 move to Paris to begin a new life; her decades with partner Alice B. Toklas; and her years of obscurity until The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her a star. Levy (The Position of Spoons) deftly intersperses moments from Stein's life and quotations from her writings with scenes involving Eva, Fanny, and the narrator. "Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen," the narrator writes. Something gloriously new happens here, too, thanks to Levy's clever work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer