Customer Reviews

Three Lives and Tender Buttons (Signet Classics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a fine, inexpensive edition of one of Stein's two most readable productions (the other being 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'). I'm giving it five stars because the item's star rating has been impaired by a reviewer who's reviewing an audiotape, NOT the signet paperback book on this page.

Tender Buttons is a great set of writing. I would also recommend the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as well as her book Paris, France.

I love Ms. Stein.

Do yourself a favor and listen to Gertrude Stein reading Gertrude Stein, before or instead of listening to this recording. Enjoy Ms. Stein's crisp diction and the wonderful rhythms of her prose and prose/poems. Hear the way the sounds cascade through the phrases and the way the phrases become the meaning.

Then, if you must, listen to this Flo Gibson set. Possibly you won't listen to much of it. I disliked it intensely. The reader appears neither to understand nor to like the material and reads with unremitting dullness of diction and unrelentingly pedestrian rhythm. In an apparent attempt to give some workaday meaning to Stein's rippling, dancing phrases, many words are heavily overemphasized, like an extremely bad and condescending reading of a children's book. But do remember --you may not react as I did.

The reading is not helped by pops and hissings, especially noticeable and intrusive on the beginning consonants of most syllables.