“Eva called to say she had lost it.”

This clever, short novel is the kind of book I would nominate for the Booker Prize.

Deborah Levy’s mission is to discern Gertrude Stein who wrote the first, maybe only, abstract novels. Or should that be cubist?  No commas, no question marks. No punctuation. What??

Stein is the unexplained. More famous as the American in Paris. She sat for Picasso. She was muse to Hemingway. Giver of salon afternoons at Rue de Fleurus with anisette or some other liqueur concocted by her ardent lover Alice Babette Tolkas, the room covered like a gallery with works of young artists from Modigliani to Matisse. Is this about Levy or about Stein? Authors egos…Levy is no shy biographer keeping herself in the background. She is a rival, a challenger, her literary cutlass is sharp. A writer on a writer who is writing about who knows really but maybe modernism versus romanticsm maybe words versus visual art. Watch out Jane Austen..

Levy settles in with conflicted graphic artist Eva who only communicates on zoom with her husband Hamish in Seattle once a week. She is Eva five, because she speaks five languages. And with chain smoking Fanny who is Fanny three because she has three lovers a month and keeps her cigarettes in her belt. Eva reads more Stein than Levy. Fannie thinks they should get a life.

Stein’s writing, says Levy, is baffling and bewildering. Levy’s is neither. She is as interested in the wives of these avante gardistes, even diverging into a short notional conversation with Hortense, aka Mrs Cezanne.

She gets distracted from her putative essay doom scrolling on her phone. Other things to worry about. Like Eva’s missing cat.

Stein was scientist, psychologist, self professed genius who was not published until she was 59, everything else, and there was a lot, transcribed and self published by the faithful Tolkas. Stein was furious that that other great not-so-often read and sometimes obscure, or a little-less-obscure writer James Joyce was published before her.

The tensions build to a rather neat psycho climax. I have only read a little Stein but maybe like many authors, they do their best work later in life. Charles Dickens Bleak House. Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. This is Deborah Levy’s tenth novel. It shows – elegant, sharp, witty, investigative.

The cover photo is of three Parisian girls, sadly not actually any of the girls here, but by Brassai from 1932 at a dance hall, but a thoughtful choice that mirrors some of the many delicious conflicting sub themes that are swirling around. Great read.