Winter 2027 – Karolina Bojdol – My year in Paris with gertrude Stein

A book about Gertrude Stein might reasonably be expected to begin with Gertrude Stein. Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein (2026) begins instead with a missing cat. The cat, named “it” (a joke, one I think Stein would have appreciated), belongs to Eva: a graphic novelist and the narrator’s new friend in Paris. The narrator is a British author who has come to the city to write an essay about Stein, but things are not going quite to plan. Much of her time is absorbed by Eva, who is searching for her cat and worrying about her husband. Then there is Fanny, a financier entangled with at least three lovers and little time for anything else.

Between these domestic searches, the narrator turns back to Stein, the American modernist writer who made Paris her home in the early twentieth century, and became known for her unconventional approach to language and literature. The novel moves between these two plotlines, so that we are always either looking for a cat or looking for Stein, and are not always sure which search is more urgent.

Levy is a writer particularly suited for such a project. Her work moves between fiction, as in her acclaimed novel Hot Milk (2016), and nonfiction, most notably her Living Autobiography trilogy — Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018), and Real Estate (2021). In the former, she explores the complicated relationship between a mother and daughter, combining psychological tension with questions of identity and independence. Her autobiographical works, meanwhile, blur the boundaries between personal experience and literary reflection, often using episodes from her own life to explore broader questions.

In an interview for Toronto Review, Levy describes My Year as “a completely new structure for me — the past and the present existing simultaneously.” Rather than simply moving between Stein’s Paris and the narrator’s, she allows the two periods to overlap, so that the narrator’s experiences in the present continually shape her understanding of Stein’s life. The novel brings the two sides of her writing together. She places another writer at the centre of a fictional narrative and turns the act of researching Stein into an examination of the narrator’s own relationship with writing. What begins as an essay on Stein becomes, partly, an essay on the narrator herself.

What unites these searches is a pronoun. The narrator has lost “it,” and it is never entirely clear whether “it” is a cat, an essay, a sense of direction, or Stein herself. The book is a quest narrative, in which we are constantly looking for an answer to the same question: what exactly is “it”? Each time seems to invite a different answer. The cat, the right words, an understanding of Stein, an understanding of the narrator, and possibly the meaning of life are all pursued with the thoroughness of someone checking under the sofa. The more the narrator tries to pin down what she is looking for, the more elusive it becomes.

Stein was pleased to call her writing “clear as mud,” and the narrator, torn between irritation and loyalty, admits that she sometimes wants to “smack it in the chops” and that reading her is exhausting; a matter of “never getting to the it of it.” Yet, she concedes that it is her destiny to defend her. Levy also admitted in the Toronto Review that she is “not a die-hard fan of Gertrude Stein,” and perhaps that is what makes the narrator’s ambivalence so convincing.

But let us go back to the cat, which becomes a metaphor for the act of writing. When the narrator admits that she does not quite understand Eva’s search, but that she has decided to throw herself into it “and see where it takes [her],” she could be describing her essay. Fanny’s solution, to rename the animal Bob “in an attempt to make it a cat again,” is a neat image of what critics do to “difficult” writers: give a slippery thing a name and hope it holds still.

Stein would have resisted this treatment, since to be understood is, after all, to be exposed. As I quickly realised, Stein had longed for readers to find her, but at the same time she wanted to stay hidden. The difficulty, in this case, becomes less of a barrier than a form of privacy, a way of staying in the room while keeping the door half closed.

What struck me most about the book is its web of quotations. Passages from Stein and other writers like Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde are so numerous that they blend with the narrator’s account of her own life. She will frequently begin a paragraph by giving information about Stein and end with a quotation from the writer herself. I often found myself moving back and forth between the two voices until it became difficult to say where one stops, and the other begins.

The effect seems deliberate. A narrator who is both lost in her life and in her essay is given a form in which it is hard to tell who is speaking, and the confusion on the page mirrors the confusion in her head. It also suits a novel so preoccupied with Stein’s idea that “you are of course never yourself.” The result resembles a conversation in a crowded café, in which all the voices overlap.

Levy’s prose helps. It is plain but punchy, favouring short, declarative sentences, trusting the reader to catch the joke, so even a dense run of quotation moves at a conversational pace. It occasionally asks us to stop and check who is speaking. To me, however, the interruption seems a fair price for a book that treats reading and living as inseparable.

Stein’s own life, as the narrator tells it, is a story of self-invention. After arriving in Paris in 1903, at 29, she gradually became one of the defining figures of its avant-garde scene. She lived with her partner Alice B. Toklas and surrounded herself with artists like Picasso and Hemingway.

However, Levy is interested not just in what Stein did in the city, but in the person she became there. The novel’s cleverest gesture is to position this alongside the narrator’s own Paris, where she, Eva, and Fanny are busy trying to reinvent themselves, much like Stein. “How do we put ourselves together?” the narrator asks, and the book’s answer seems to be: badly, communally, chaotically, and in a foreign city. What keeps the parallel from feeling schematic is that the novel never quite insists on it. Instead, it leaves us to make the comparison ourselves.

The story is also firmly rooted in its moment. Set in November 2024, it holds Trump’s re-election in constant view. “Meanwhile, bombs are falling through the twenty-first century,” the narrator observes, while “we are on our screens all the time, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.” The repetition does exactly what it describes: the words seem to keep moving without taking us anywhere. While reading this part, I caught myself recalling headlines of yet another political scandal that I had read about only a few hours before, and how quickly I had moved on to something else. The passage seemed to have anticipated me.

Stein offers a different perspective. She lived through two world wars and wrote Wars I Have Seen (1945). Yet, “she did not see either of these wars on a screen.” The contrast gives the novel a more serious edge.

What does it mean to witness suffering through a screen, and then continue with our ordinary lives?

Levy never pretends the narrator has an answer. Even here, she allows herself a joke: “Like the rise of fascism everywhere, the pigeons were out in full.” The comparison sits rather uneasily beside everything happening in the background — and perhaps that is the point. The narrator is still looking for “it” while the world outside demands to be noticed.

Then comes the moment that brings Stein and the present together most effectively: “Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself.” It may be a wry comparison, but looking at the state of the world today, it is difficult to laugh. Stein could at least imagine that the old century needed to be destroyed before something new could take its place. The narrator has less confidence in what is replacing it. For all the book’s wandering, this is one of its clearest moments: the past was busy trying to invent modernity; we are too busy trying to survive it.

Despite all the uncertainty surrounding the narrator’s world, the novel returns to a more familiar mystery: Eva’s missing cat. The narrator asks Jean-Luc, a man she has been seeing, about his cat:

“Do you own a cat, Jean-Luc?” I was beginning to sound like Chief Inspector Maigret.

“One doesn’t ever own a cat.” He lowered his voice. “Any more than I could own you.”

“But you live with a cat?”

“It lives with me.”

Here, perhaps, is the closest the novel comes to an answer regarding the search for the missing animal. The narrator has spent the book chasing it, calling it by different names, and blaming herself when it would not come to heel. But writing, like a cat, does not belong to the person who feeds it.

Thoughts are much the same. They arrive, wander off, and occasionally turn up somewhere else. The most a writer can do is live with them, rather than possess them. This is exactly how the narrator’s essay has behaved, borrowing Stein’s sentences and returning them slightly altered. Jean-Luc’s comment reads, to me, as the novel’s quiet verdict on Stein: the narrator never possesses her subject, and the book is clever enough not to pretend otherwise.

Yet, while the narrator never quite gets hold of Stein, we may come away with something rather different. By the final pages, the narrator is, if anything, more bewildered about who Stein was than when she arrived in Paris. However, I finished the novel with a better understanding and a greater appreciation of her.

On paper, this should be a failure. A biographical project that ends in deeper confusion has, by the looks of it, gone wrong. But the book makes the confusion feel like fidelity, and it names what it offers in place of an answer: “The performance of it. The confusion of it. The pleasure of it.” The narrator never resolves Stein, but she lets the confusion and the pleasure sit side by side, and that is a more honest way of reading a difficult writer than a definitive answer would have been.

The novel gave me a way of approaching Stein rather than a conclusion about her: slowly, with irritation and affection in equal measure, and with the sense that the effort is part of the encounter. We stand slightly outside the narrator’s bewilderment, able to enjoy the confusion she can only endure. In the end, we are left with a Stein who is no clearer but considerably more alive.

“All writing is about walking ghosts,” the narrator muses, and the novel is pleasantly haunted by Stein and by its own borrowed voices. Its narrator does not find “it.” I suspect that I did.

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