REVIEW: My Year In Paris With Gertrude Stein - Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)

Gertrude Stein—avant‑garde American poet, art collector, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and self‑declared genius—may be a new name to many New Zealand readers, yet she remains one of the most influential figures in literary modernism, a writer who has baffled and exhilarated critics for more than a century. 

In Deborah Levy’s dazzling new fiction, the narrator travels to Paris to understand why Stein matters, and in doing so becomes entangled with Eva, “with the blinding gaze,” an artist negotiating a long‑distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read, and argue late into the night. 

As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, the narrator thinks about what must be surrendered to become modern—how to navigate anxiety, uncertainty, angry fathers, migration, art, and language—and how these questions looked to Gertrude Stein in the early twentieth century and look to her and her friends now, in the early twenty‑first. 

Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a formally inventive, intellectually agile work that stages an encounter between two writers separated by a century yet bound by shared questions about authorship, identity, and the conditions under which artistic authority is produced. Although the narrator spends only one month in Paris, Levy frames the experience as a “year,” signalling both the elastic temporality of literary influence and the intensity with which Stein’s presence saturates the narrator’s thinking. The book becomes a study in how writers inherit, resist, and recompose the voices of their predecessors.

Stein occupies a central position in the development of modernist literature. Born in 1874 in Pennsylvania and educated in psychology at Radcliffe under William James, Stein developed an early interest in consciousness, perception, and the instability of language—concerns that would later shape her literary experiments. After moving to Paris in 1903, she established, with her brother Leo, a salon at 27 rue de Fleurus that became a crucible for modernist innovation. Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald passed through her rooms, encountering both her formidable personality and her radical prose.

Her major works—including Tender Buttons (1914), The Making of Americans (1925), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)—challenge conventional narrative structures. Stein’s use of repetition, fragmentation, and syntactic disruption sought to capture the movement of thought rather than the progression of plot. Levy’s narrator acknowledges this difficulty directly, remarking that Stein’s prose “refuses to behave,” a line that encapsulates both admiration and frustration.

Levy’s narrator approaches Stein not as a monument but as a problem—an enigmatic figure whose work resists easy interpretation. This resistance becomes productive, prompting the narrator to reconsider what literary understanding entails.

Levy situates her narrator in contemporary Paris, a city that becomes both a physical landscape and a conceptual framework. The narrator’s daily movements—through cafés, archives, cemeteries, and apartments—mirror Stein’s own belief that writing emerges from the rhythms of lived experience. Paris is not merely a backdrop; it is a methodological tool.

The narrator befriends two women, Eva and Fanny, whose lives intersect with her research in ways that blur the boundaries between biography and fiction. Eva’s missing cat becomes a recurring motif, a playful meditation on the instability of the word it, echoing Stein’s fascination with linguistic slipperiness. Levy underscores this with the narrator’s observation that “a cat is never just a cat in Paris,” a line that gestures toward the city’s symbolic density.

These narrative threads do not resolve in conventional ways. Instead, they accumulate, echo, and refract—an approach that mirrors Stein’s compositional techniques and foregrounds Levy’s interest in literary inheritance as a dynamic, ongoing process.

Stein’s personality—magnetic, intimidating, playful, domestic, and uncompromising—forms a central axis of Levy’s exploration. Stein’s confidence, particularly her insistence on her own genius, is presented not as arrogance but as a strategic assertion of authority in a male‑dominated cultural sphere. Levy’s narrator is both fascinated and unsettled by this confidence, noting that Stein “walked into the room as if she had invented it.” 

Levy does not attempt to imitate Stein’s fractured syntax. Instead, she channels Stein’s intellectual spirit: her curiosity, her refusal to obey literary conventions, her belief that writing should capture consciousness in motion. The narrator’s struggle to “get into Stein’s eyes” becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of accessing another person’s interiority—especially one who has been mythologised by literary history.

The title 'My Year in Paris...' is deliberately misleading. The narrator’s stay lasts one month, yet Levy frames it as a year to emphasise the intensity of the narrator’s intellectual and emotional transformation. The narrator reflects that “a month can feel like a year when you are reading someone who rearranges your thinking”.

The “year” becomes a metaphor for the immersive quality of literary study, the expansion of time through artistic engagement, and the tradition of writers describing their Paris years as formative, regardless of duration. It also echoes Stein’s own disregard for conventional temporal structures. In this sense, the title participates in the book’s broader interrogation of narrative form: time becomes subjective, elastic, and shaped by intellectual experience rather than chronology.

For many Kiwi readers, Stein may be relatively unfamiliar, overshadowed by more widely taught modernists such as Catherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. Yet Stein’s significance extends far beyond her immediate historical moment. Her experiments with language anticipate contemporary concerns about identity, voice, and the politics of representation—issues still central to our own literary landscape.

Levy’s narrator gestures toward Stein’s ongoing relevance when she remarks that Stein “was writing the future before it arrived.” I love this line. It resonates strongly in a country where writers continually negotiate questions of cultural inheritance, biculturalism, and the ethics of storytelling. Moreover, Stein’s role as a queer woman asserting intellectual authority offers a powerful model for understanding how marginalised voices reshape literary traditions. Levy’s book thus provides New Zealand audiences with an opportunity to engage with a foundational modernist figure whose ideas remain urgently relevant to contemporary debates about authorship and identity.

Levy’s novel becomes both an exhilarating meditation on friendship, desire, and the difficulty of living with other people, and a genre‑breaking portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with new forms of living and thinking, wrestling herself free from the nineteenth century to invent an entirely new way of seeing the world.

This a sophisticated, genre‑defying work that stages a profound meditation on literary influence, artistic identity, and the politics of genius. Levy’s narrator discovers that Stein’s legacy cannot be neatly summarised or resolved. Instead, Stein remains a living presence—provocative, elusive, and generative—whose work continues to challenge contemporary writers to rethink what literature can do.