Product Description

For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39358 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable, but with reservations
An enjoyable read: the world of Stein and Toklas seemed to revolve round anyone who was anyone in the early 20th century art world, and the anecdotes about famous artists will doubtless appeal.

Ultimately, though, I found this book unsatisfying: we don't really get to know much about either Alice, Gertrude, their relationship or their friends. The name dropping - "Picasso called by for tea" "Man Ray came to photograph Gertrude Stein" etc - gets rather tedious, as does Toklas's hero worship of Stein (i.e. Stein's own consideration of herself as a genius).

I much preferred the later "Alice B. Toklas Cookbook", writted by Toklas herself after Stein's death: although containing recipes (most famously "Hascish Fudge") it is mainly an account of their life together in occupied France.