“If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at John Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century. Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress. Get rid of clichés. Break through the conventions of genre. Stein was going to step out of the frame, away from the life of her mother and aunts, away from the uncomfortable femininities that had been societally constructed to keep her in her place.”
– Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein
If there was ever a city in which to deconstruct your identity and step out of the frame of your own self-perception, it would be Paris.
Picasso, Hemingway, Chagall, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, Modigliani, Kundera, Wilde, Dali and Joyce. They all journeyed to the banks of the river Seine to shed a few skins and dip their feet into the streams of consciousness of past and future centuries. Unmoored and hungry for a revolution.
So did the enigma that is Gertrude Stein.
If there was ever a perfect writer to explore the nooks and crannies of modernism, it would be Deborah Levy. She came to Paris looking for Stein, armed with two soaked London raincoats, unmoored and hungry for a fight.
What she gives us is a novel/treatise/meditation that is as slippery, visually striking and intellectually delightful as a film by Jean-Luc Godard or Éric Rohmer, punctured by shards of texts, philosophical questions, the daily conversations between three women friends on the hunt for a lost cat named It.
By exploding the linearity of traditional literary criticism, Levy creates a living tableau that is anything but still, always in motion, always rearranging itself in space, in perpetual dialogue.
There is a painting of Levy by Paul-Hebert Percy in the National Portait Gallery in London that encapsulates her genius: her face, but split in three, kaleidoscopic, a third eye unmoored and hungry for expression.
Cherchez la femme.
