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A review by casparb
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
4.0
A smooth and lightly amusing piece of autobiographical (is it?) writing. I'm sure we're aware of Stein's Parisian popularity, but this book really shines a light on the extent of it. It is time to indulge in list-making. In the space of ten years, dinner-guests to Stein's house include Picasso (Stein and Picasso were close friends), Matisse, Juan Gris, Pound & Eliot, Mina Loy, Ford Madox Ford, Edith Sitwell, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Cèzanne, Wyndham Lewis, Joyce, Renoir, Daumier. There are many others - I forget, and one receives the impression that the book leaves out many. The bulk of this book is anecdotes of Parisian and wartime rompings with the above, so I suppose if that's of any remote interest to anybody then do look into it.
This is a work complicated by the title - Stein writes the autobiography of her wife/lover Alice (diplomatically described as 'companion' on the blurb of my 1960 edition). But it's not an autobiography of Alice. The book starts with Stein and ends with her. And I'm delighted by that.
This is a work complicated by the title - Stein writes the autobiography of her wife/lover Alice (diplomatically described as 'companion' on the blurb of my 1960 edition). But it's not an autobiography of Alice. The book starts with Stein and ends with her. And I'm delighted by that.