Customer Reviews

Gertrude and Alice

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2 star:		(1)
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Wow, it's been 20 years since Ms. Souhami wrote this book and fortunately it is again in print with this edition which also includes a new introduction by her. The introduction itself is amazing and worth buying another copy of the book even if you already have one. (You can give your other copy to a friend!)

This is the best dual-bio of these two ladies (and I've read it both in German and English.) The book makes both of them very real, moving them beyond the literary/lesbian icons that they've become in the last 60+ years. Read this in conjunction with James Mellow's CHARMED CIRCLE (you can still find it online through used book dealers or in many 2nd hand bookstores.) and you'll be hooked both on Gertrude and Alice and the artistic era between the two World Wars!

Oh my goodness .. if you've been 'enamored' of Gertrude & Alice for years & years, or are just discovering them .. this is THE story of their lives together. Grab this book before it goes out of print again !!

I am not a scholar and I am not sure that I would have the patience to read Gertrude "dans le texte". Yet I have a dilettant interest in these women of the first half of this century who seemed to have had a strong influence on the Arts and Litterature (Stein/Toklas, Cones, Sitwells...). I picked up this book by chance off the bookselves of my friends -- Liz and Jeff -- a rainy day by the Delaware River. I not only finished it off but enjoyed it tremenduously. I found the writting interesting, detailled (what a treat to get so many details of that era) and refreshing by its ease of access. Do read this book -- I am now onto other Stein/Toklas books (most certainly Alice's recipes).

I couldn't warm to this book, for two reasons. Firstly, it's the sort of book that reviewers love, because it's about a writer. Correction, it's about Gertrude Stein, who thought she could write, and her amanuensis Alice, who typed up her repetitive compositions. Alice thought Gertrude was a genius, because when she first saw her bells went off inside her head. The same phenomenom occurred when she met Picasso. Had she realised they were alarm bells she might have saved everybody a lot of trouble. Instead Pablo was encouraged by Gertrude, and Gertrude was encouraged by Alice.

Leo Stein, Gertrude's brother, was far more clearsighted. He had some appreciation of art, and called both their efforts "Godalmighty rubbish" and "Cubico futuristic tommy-rotting". If only his judgement had prevailed. Instead Alice encouraged Gertrude to persist in her delusion, despite repeated rejections from prospective publishers whose job it was to make sound commercial judgements.

Boiling it all down, this is a book about two ladies who tried hard to make a success of writing, and failed. Not on the face of it promising material, but it could have been redeemed had Diana Souhami written a compelling narrative. Instead of which, one is subjected to a tedious prose, in which irrelevant details are scattered (one lunch attendee is described as having had double-jointed thumbs), but there is an irritating vagueness about the relationships between the principal characters.

In fact, the funniest part of the book (and, despite what the reviewers write, a barrel of laughs it ain't) is when Mr Fifield, of Clifford's Inn, London returned the 147-page manuscript of "Portraits" with a covering letter hoisting Gertrude on her own petard by mimicking her impenetrable prose, but far more wittily than she was capable of herself. If like me you've been misled into purchasing this Tale of Two Mittys, my advice is simply to read and enjoy page 148, it will save an awful lot of time.

This is a well written small book that explains things. The puzzle unexplained is why Gertrude stayed in an unpleasantly nazi occupied France and paled around with an obnoxious nazi in order to get favors. Its clear that Alice ruled the roost and didn't want to lose Gertrude. The author debunks Gertrude's unbearable stream-of-conscious form of writing rightly putting it in the class of the emperor's new clothes.