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This book captures the heart of 20th century Paris, and chronicles the city before and after the first world war.

Stein ran an artistic hub from her house and around her formed an important circle of writers, artists and thinkers. She met Picasso, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She spoke to Ezra Pound and exchanged letters with T.S Eliot. She supported artists in Paris and bought their paintings when they were first starting out. All in all, she was a purveyor and supporter of the arts.

She was also a lesbian, living with Alice Toklas who spoke to the wives of the important men Stein met. So this was written by Stein under the guise of her friend and lover. Stein expresses friendship very strongly. Her friends clearly meant a lot too her, and she influenced them as much as they influenced her. She had a constant exchange of ideas with people.


-Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso (1906)

Other than that, it's a bit dull

Stein advocates for the beauty of writing, for creating artistic sentences and prose; yet, for all that, she has little to know skill at doing so. Her sentences are endless pieces of ordinariness. There’s no skill involved in them. At one point she mentions one as being particularly good, but there is nothing to it. It’s no more skilful than I’m writing here. I’m not sure what she is reading in her own work, but I certainly cannot see it. Read a page of Woolf then a page of Stein and you will see precisely what I mean. There’s nothing in her words except endless repetition about her own books. It’s like she was taking very opportunity to sell me one of them, irrelevant for sure to the motives behind an autobiography.

I’ve also read Paris, France and had a similar reaction to the dull nature of the writing. It’s a bit better, only because it’s in the first person, but it has none of the skill the writer professes it contains. I don’t think I will ever try one of her other books. There’s no passion in her words. As I said, the value of this book is with the image it creates of a modern France. And if you’re interested in 20th century Europe it’s certainly something you should read along with Hemingway's A Movable Feast.

I found myself skimming sections, so I was quite glad to finally finish it. It's a curiosity, though a bit of a trudge.