My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy audiobook review – gripping vision of a fearless writer

A fictional British author in Paris sets out to explore Stein through the lens of her own friendships, in this inventive, perfectly paced portrait

It is late 2024, and an unnamed British author living in Paris is trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer and art collector. The author has been distracted by her friend Eva’s cat, who is lost and whose name is “it” in lower case, which inevitably leads to confusion – has Eva lost her cat or her mind? (Her other friend, Fanny, has rechristened the cat Bob, to make talking about him easier.)

The Pennsylvania-born Stein was painted by Picasso, hung out with Hemingway and wrote strange, stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce embarked on his masterwork Ulysses. Commercial success didn’t come until she was in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a biography of her partner and one of her more accessible books. Our narrator is an admirer of Stein’s work, yet she can be exasperated by it. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops. [Stein] longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found.”

A blend of fiction and biography, Deborah Levy’s ninth novel is read by voice actor Kristin Atherton; her narration is cool, precise and perfectly paced. We follow the author as she goes to Père Lachaise cemetery in search of Stein’s grave and where she reflects on the lives of other literary luminaries, and on her own friendships. The Stein who emerges in this unusual and gripping portrait is fearless, innovative and, the author notes, “so forward-looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T”.

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