Book of the Week: MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN by Deborah Levy
“All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer. Towards our parents or something like them. Towards our sibling and lovers and friends or something like them. Towards the unknown. Towards the edge of a cliff.” As Paris sweeps the narrtor of Levy’s latest fiction along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks about what we have to lose to become modern, about navigating anxiety, about living with uncertainty, about angry fathers, about making a new life in another country, about art and language — and how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century. This is a novel about how we put ourselves together and about living with other people, but it is also crashes through genre to create a portrait of Stein herself — a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and writing, and new way of looking at the world.