A Novel of Thank You

by Gertrude Stein

This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chap. 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write. Mixed in with her meditations on writing are daily events in her marriage to Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. As she writes at one point, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything, " so everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1994

About the author

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.

Reviews

[Feral Academic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I FINISHED. I HAVE FINISHED THIS NOVEL. Whew. Ok so if a novel is a wine, this is a wine not to be gulped but sipped, walked away from, sipped again, and so on. This is not how I read it this time, because I plan to return to it more slowly armed with an idea of the whole picture. I do not recommend this book if you are neither an academic (or academically inclined) or an artist. If you are either of those, I think it is a worthwhile venture. If my reading is correct, it's basically like she is using a painting to comment on the current state and recent history of art while also using paint to comment on colors and the texture of the paint itself. Could it just be pretentious nonsense? Many have said this, but I think that they are wrong. I do not understand it well enough to offer definitive proof though, lol. Is it pretentious? Certainly!, but we read Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway and all of those damned French existentialists, don't we?

[Ani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein because. Because if Gertrude Stein because? In truth... I wanted to poke my own eyes out as I laboured through this book. I read reviews heralding it as the book of how a creator creates. As I followed, line by line, all I could think of was that story about the emporer having no clothes on and I was that kid that said, "no he does not!" I got through the novel because I needed to get through the novel. I wanted an Epiphany. I wanted to feel changed for the better in some way. Unfortunately, I was only me at the end of the book and no closer to having any kind of clue what it was all about. I am disappointed and a bit annoyed. Perhaps i should string all my notes together, throw in some chapter breaks and publish it as The Novel Of You're Welcome.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's amazing how one can pick out nearly any atom from some Stein novels and find that it captures the overall structure of the work, writ small. It's unified-field literature.

[Lorraine Tosiello · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Let us consider the value of thank you the novel of thank you and the novel of thank you and the value of the novel of thank you." from "A Novel of Thank you" Gertrude Stein

No novel of 240 pages should take two months and finally a global quarantine to get me to finish it.
Under no circumstances, whether I read slowly and deliberately, whether I read out loud, whether I scanned the pages, could I ever persist past five pages. I thought I had it, I thought I could conquer it, I thought I would fall into it, get mesmerized, nope...it was unintelligible from the first to the last page.

Why did I persist? Because I would give an icon of modern literature the benefit of the doubt. And then, I think I got it: trying to find a plot or a cohesive sentence in "A Novel Of Thank You" is like trying to find the face in a cubist painting. It's not the point. The point is: how do we see (or hear)? How we simulate life?

It was clever to construct a novel nearly devoid of nouns, to give the cadence and impression of language without exactly saying anything. Perhaps if it were "A Short Story of Thank You" I would recommend it more. Life's too short to puzzle over a Gertrude Stein novel.

(This rating benefited from "rounding up", because I would have given it a 2.5)

[joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stein takes the conventions of narrative and reduces them to their essential operations, so that, as in Lucy Church Amiably, the traditional 19th-century novel is stripped of its temporal and psychological foundations and is replaced by a continuous present of reiterated expression. With no advance of plot or unfolding of character, attention can instead be directed to the very act of composition, and the work thus becomes its own extended preparation for itself, a "What is a sentence?" but, you know, "What is a novel?" For lest we forget “It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything” (93) !!

[Ms. · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is interesting that of the six or so people who rated this book, not one of them actually wrote any comments. My hypothesis is that none of them actually read the book because this book is virtually unreadable. Opening at random I quote, "Having heard may having heard may it having heard may it be having heard it. Please unite plans. To feel that it were not satisfying if she were not satisfied... " and so on endlessly.

I'm sure Ms. Stein gave great parties, but this is not great literature.

[Sarah Hall Steiner · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many sentences in this book that I loved, and I don't particularly like writing reviews, so I will keep it short and give you one of the top five, IMO:
"To run and balance and orangutan." (p117)