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"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate marriage.”
As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes.
The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.
Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning you need a crowbar for that but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.
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Subjects
American Authors, Americans, Biography, History, Intellectual life, Stein, gertrude, 1874-1946, Toklas, alice b., 1878-1967, Authors, american, Authors, biography, Americans, france, Paris (france), intellectual life, LGBTQ biography and memoir, Stonewall Book Awards, New York Times reviewed, Författare, Biografi, Amerikanskor, Amerikanska kvinnliga författare, Amerikaner, Historia, Intellektuellt liv, collection:judy_grahn_award=winner, American JewsPlaces
France, Paris, Paris (France)Times
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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
2007, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne University Press
in English
0522854362 9780522854367
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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
September 27, 2007, Yale University Press
Hardcover
in English
0300125518 9780300125511
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"When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the White House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds."
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- Created April 30, 2008
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July 29, 2014 | Edited by ImportBot | import new book |
April 6, 2014 | Edited by ImportBot | Added IA ID. |
August 12, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |