Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice - Hardcover

Malcolm, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300125518 ISBN 13: 9780300125511

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Two Lives 'How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?' The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master 'whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness' and 'thin, plain, tense, sour' Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. Full description

About this title

Review:

'...Malcolm turns the biographer's impulse towards the biographers. They become characters in search for insight into Stein's life, and the process of writing biography, of accumulating facts, is itself narrated like a story. Malcolm's astonishing gift is largely the gift of a novelist.' -- International Herald Tribune, September 22, 2007

'Almost everything Malcolm writes, though, germinates in the reader's mind. Her stimulating book will also save anyone hereafter from feeling they ought to read The Making of Americans, of which it supplies a vivid, respectful and utterly off-putting account.' -- The Spectator, October 27, 2007

'Janet Malcolm also has the gift of keeping her readers glued to the page, and she peppers a fascinating story with her insights into biographical form.' -- Sunday Telegraph, November 4, 2007

'Janet Malcolm's book packs heavyweight punches about truth versus fiction...'
-- Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, December 8/9, 2007

'Malcolm's account of US Stein-criticism is fascinating. By framing her version of Stein's life within the story of how she reached it, she humanises her subject and, in conveying the origiin of her own fascination, she increases ours. What she never does is simply give in and write anything approaching straight-forward biography.' -- The Times, October 27, 2007

'Malcolm's research into those murky war-time and post-war events reads like a great detective story...This short, cogently argued, wholly original book wil irrevocably alter history's view of Stein and Toklas...' -- The Daily Mail, October 19, 2007

'The most touching parts of Malcolm's book are those in which she addresses a matter tactfully skirted round in standard short tours of Gertrude Stein -- the unreadability of most of what she wrote, and certainly everything in her "modernist" mode.' -- The Sunday Times 'Culture', October 28, 2007

Synopsis:

'How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?' Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master 'whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness' and 'thin, plain, tense, sour' Alice B. Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties', she writes.The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat."Two Lives" is also a work of literary criticism. 'Even the most hermetic of Stein's writings are works of submerged autobiography', Malcolm writes.

'The key of "I" will not unlock the door to their meaning - you need a crowbar for that - but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion'. Whether unpacking the accessible "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", in which Stein 'solves the koan of autobiography', or wrestling with "The Making of Americans", a masterwork of 'magisterial disorder', Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0300125518
• ISBN 13: 9780300125511
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240