A review by foggy_rosamund
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

3.0

Gertrude Stein writes her own autobiography, from the perspective of her partner, Alice B. Toklas. A wealthy American in Paris, Gertrude Stein acts as a patron of the arts, as well as working on her own writing, and her dead-pan descriptions of various artists, as well as the creative process, are often very wry and amusing. I enjoyed most of this book, but at times became bogged down in the parade of artists, intellectuals, writers, and others. The narrative is an interesting mixture of chaos and hedonism, with wry asides about Paris, Americans, and various nationalities. I felt that Stein's narrative voice let her down when she was writing about World War 1: her deadpan style loses its charm, and the sense that the Americans are treating the War as a lark, of which they are disinterested observers, is strange and jarring.

This book is fascinatingly queer: though the partnership between Alice and Gertrude is never made explicit, it is written everywhere between the lines. Alice is written as Gertrude Stein's devoted wife, and Gertrude Stein depicts herself as a stalwart genius, whose name is always given in full. There is something daring and thrilling about a relationship between two women being given the same treatment as, for example, Picasso or Matisse's relationships with their wives. It's also frustrating, because Gertrude Stein is clearly the patriarch/matriarch of the situation, and there is no sense that there should be equality between two members of a relationship -- just that geniuses need wives.

This book has one of the best final paragraphs I've ever read.