Amazon.com Review
There is no summarizing or explaining the writings of Gertrude Stein. With the exception of her fledgling efforts like
Three Lives or her funny, successful memoir,
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her fictions are without conventional plot, setting, or character. They are intellectual flowers, each sentence growing or receding from the one before it, repeating its main points with subtle, telling changes. In
Lucy Church Amiably, first published in Paris in 1930 and long out of print, Stein describes the landscape and pastoral life of central France (while writing, she was staying near a small village named Lucy) in and through her character Lucy Church: "Gradually remembering a lake. Gradually. Remembering. A lake. In gradually remembering a lake by the shore of the lake where they were sitting." Yet Stein is not opaque or purely musical: she always provides solid details in unexpected places, specializing, as the critic Fred Dupee put it, in "the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense." She is a central figure in the modernist movement, but her relentless pleasure in her quirky, handmade idiom can repel the unwary reader. Although it is a delight to have this reprint, a brief introduction would have been useful for the uninitiated. Those interested in Stein should also turn to her
Selected Writings, or, for a painless entrée to her work, begin with
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
--Regina Marler
From Library Journal
This 1927 title is one of Stein's lesser-known works. Written during the magical age of the Paris expatriates, it was a vanity publication, as were most of her books, but made very little impression. It returned in 1969, and again barely caused a ripple, perhaps because it doesn't really have any plot to speak of but is more of Stein's automatic writing and repetition of images. Stein has almost become a literary cult figure, with a steady following, so libraries would be wise to invest in this volume.
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