6/5/2023 0 Comments Two Lives by Janet MalcolmEvery time I picked up the book, I put it down again. This is not a normal biography.įor a long time I put off reading The Making of Americans. And, indeed, Malcolm never writes about the women’s childhoods or lives apart from one another, nor do we see how and when they met, or anything that you might expect in a normal biography. It’s a bit dizzying, this in media res, where we are exploring the details of competing versions of the story – two from different autobiographies Stein wrote one from Toklas – before we’ve been told anything about them and their lives. We are thrown immediately into comparing three different accounts of Stein and Toklas trying to rent a house that belonged to a lieutenant in France in World War Two. Toklas, I bought it – and thank goodness I did, because I have been introduced to a rather wonderful writer. So when I saw a copy of Two Lives (2007) by Janet Malcolm, about Stein and her partner Alice B. A while ago I read Blood on the Dining Room Floor by Gertrude Stein and found it more or less unreadable – the sort of High Modernism that renders every sequence of words gibberish – but I wanted to read more about her life.
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