My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

by Deborah Levy

In contemporary Paris, a narrator and two companions explore the life and work of Gertrude a subversive imagining of a truly subversive female artist.

Our narrator has a lot going on. Her friend Eva’s cat is missing—also, she wonders, where is Eva’s husband. Their other friend Fanny is barely around, and not because of her job in finance; she is tangled up with no less than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator’s life.

She is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early twentieth century. There are the Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels, plays, poetry, and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her daring wife, the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

But so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language? Only a book like this, only a book by Deborah Levy, “an indelible writer [and] elliptical genius” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review), could attempt such an investigation. It crashes through genre to form something distinctively, utterly new—an imaginative, entertaining, and scholarly manifestation befitting the genius at its center. This is My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.

Genres: Fiction, Paris, France, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Writing, Travel

230 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 16, 2026

About the author

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)

Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deborah Levy moved to Paris to produce a biography of Gertrude Stein, its working title Mama of Dada. But instead, she developed this fluid, compelling novel about trying and failing to finish it. Although queer author, art collector and thinker Stein’s experiences dominate the narrative, it also becomes an entry point into a broader meditation on women writers and creators, about identity, about modernity, about war and loss. It’s steeped in French culture from the very start, even the opening centred on the search for a lost cat eccentrically named ‘it’ echoes Cédric Klapisch’s classic movie Chacun cherche son chat. It’s Paris, November 2024, the novel’s narrator’s caught up with friend Eva’s desperate quest to find her beloved cat. It’s a welcome distraction from the narrator’s stalled essay about Gertrude Stein. So far all she has is a series of images and associations running through her mind : the wars happening now versus the wars Stein lived through; Paris scenes including the iconic Père Lachaise Cemetery Stein’s final resting place; the artists also buried there whose existence was irrevocably marked by war from Chaim Soutine to Georges Braque.

The quest for ‘it’ the cat becomes enmeshed with the narrator’s semi-philosophical quest for other lost ‘its’, symbol of the narrator’s uncertainties, her desire to make sense of her rapidly-changing world. A world the narrator thinks of in stark terms, “Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself.” Stein represents many things but among them is the shift from the Victorian to the modern. Was it a moment of gradual change or a moment of rupture? Stein was known too for taking realism to task, dismantling it bit by bit, a true iconoclast who devoted herself to producing work that defied ease of interpretation. In this, another of her self-proclaimed novels of ideas, Levy too is playing with realities. Her novel presents arguments, deals with artifice, with stand-ins, avatars, perhaps doppelgangers. The narrator is clearly another of Levy’s versions of herself, her Paris bolthole with its Kelim rugs and low beams explicitly replicates the place Levy inhabited in real life.

The narrator’s formed a trio with Eva and Fanny. Eva is another drawn to France, Fanny has always lived there. Three seems to hold special significance for Levy. Here the friends bring to mind Stein’s famous Three Lives but equally Levy’s assertion that she often reflects on, at least, three contradictory ways of thinking, embracing enigmas and ambiguities in her fiction. Not unlike Stein. The friends overlap yet remain distinct, Fanny’s polyamorous, juggling a number of women at any one time, some more important to her than others. She works in a resolutely capitalist industry but her personal life borders on old-school bohemian. Eva’s working on a graphic novel, her affections, her security gained from her bond with ‘it’ whose disappearance prompts a myriad of anxieties. Stein’s thoughts intermingle with the narrator's, particularly certain aphoristic statements. One seems particularly important, “Others are secret because they are other.” A saying that applies not only to the narrator’s writing block but to the very concept of biography, its fundamental impossibility, its mutability. Equally it comments on the narrator’s personal relationships especially with Eva whose subsequent choices reveal her to be quite different from the individual the narrator believed she knew.

Meanwhile the hunt for the elusive ‘it’ – the many elusive ‘its’ – continues. Cats have always been special to Levy. But this phantom cat is the catalyst for unexpected encounters. An older man on a park bench somehow becomes part of the trio’s everyday. His strange interest in the narrator’s knees, his shock of white hair, his cane, his name Jean-Luc, suggest a composite of Rohmer, Derrida, and Godard – one of Levy’s favourite directors who famously stated, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.” Levy’s narrative is haunted by the guns firing in Ukraine, distant Gaza and her cat is curiously absent both there and not there. Just as the narrator’s attempts to accurately represent Stein are both progressing and frustratingly blocked. But Jean-Luc, who may or may not have been robbed of a similar cat, also seems to represent a culture of ideas and creativity dominated by masculine energies and perspectives. One that’s been very much visible throughout recent French history from philosophy to New Wave cinema and beyond. Levy’s narrator and Fanny suggest a turning away from this heritage, acknowledging its strengths but – again like Stein - refusing to follow in its footsteps. Fanny, in a sense, through her profession negotiates her role within male-dominated spheres. However, Eva, it seems, ultimately capitulates. I didn’t learn much about Stein I didn’t already know but I relished the ways in which the narrator’s notions about Stein opened up a dialogue about gender, about freedom and responsibility, about being in a current moment in an increasingly unpredictable, ravaged world. It’s a markedly feminist piece, albeit a rather rarefied bourgeois feminism, thoughtful, insightful and incredibly engaging. I’m not a huge fan of Levy’s novels but loved her memoirs and this offers similar pleasures.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Hamish Hamilton for an ARC

[makayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book just went triple platinum in my mind

[Torrin Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Meanwhile, bombs are falling through the twenty-first century upon the living and the soon-to-be dead.”

Deborah Levy seems to be the only intellectual cosmically qualified for the job of interrogating the life of Gertrude Stein from her current place in history decades upstream. As with all of her books, in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy creates a separate realm that exists in both body and mind, the real and the surreal. She drags her hand (and pen) across the border where realism ends, where otherworldly wisdom is waiting to break through and to be channeled by the right writer. Along with Deborah Levy's unique writing and sharp perception, she delivers a thorough biography of Gertrude Stein despite her opaqueness. Only Deborah Levy could do it.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

she’s so bloody good

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

love my girl deb lev

[Rendezvouswithbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty first century seems to be killing itself."

..& how perfectly the unnamed narrator of this Genre Defying, witty novel imbibes her inspiration "Gertrude Stein" when she kills the expectations of her past to live in the shadow of a literary giant like Stein but then also finds that the very idea of a future seems to be killing itself in the messy reality of her 21st century friendships & relationships

She has moved to Paris & is spending time with her 2 friends Eva (a Danish artist in a long distance marriage) & Fanny ( an adventurous French financier who believes in polyamory). Here she is trying to write an essay on Stein. While it has been constantly reiterated throughout the book that Stein (a formidable American writer & art collector) doesn't like to be understood, the irony of the concept lies right here coz the protagonist absolutely reveres Stein & is also trying to understand her so as to write this essay about her

But she also finds the task nearly impossible, feeling both captivated and frustrated by Stein’s baffling prose

"(Gertrude Stein) removed all question marks from her work because she said it was obvious when something is a question. She found them revolting. And she thought commas were servile. Readers should be free to take a breath whenever they feel like it. Her main aim was for a sentence to push onwards"

The narrative starts with the sentence
"Eva called to say she had lost it"

It's only when you read the next sentence that you come to know that the 'it' in the sentence is a Cat. But then I guess that's the mastery of Levy's work, even if for a second she lets your mind travel a whole lot of dimensions trying to figure out what that 'it' can be - is 'it' mind, is 'it' identity, is 'it' goals

"While Picasso was painting her portrait, he couldn't paint her head. Perhaps he was transmitting Stein shaped sentences to his paint brush. A Stein shaped sentence is a very bespoke thing."

Levy isn't shy of name dropping, finding connections or even creating them

"I am walking through the hundred and ten acres of Père Lachaise Cemetery in the 20th arrondissement to find the grave of Gertrude Stein. Here in the wind and rain I see the dead buried in my mind, lit up, lit up with life, vanity, suffering and fame. I know what a few of them looked like from photographs and paintings, the various attitudes in their eyes and their various talents. Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Proust, Apollinaire, Georges Perec, Colette, Modigliani, are all buried here"

This only further amplifies narrator's chaotic mind which finds more clarity in the cemetery than she does in the chaotic lives of her friends, Fanny and Eva

This book is something special. I don't even know how to pitch it to you. I can gauge that my review is chaotic, much like my mind after reading this book which is chaotic riot but yet so good, so cerebral, so funny and so engaging. I have highlighted every next paragraph. There are many quotes but then there are many sentences which don't have the traits of a quote yet I want to read them again & again

This one became all the more special to me with its mention of elite dancers like Merce Cunningham & Isadora Duncan in it, who have had a great impact on my career as a dancer -choreographer

This is my 1st book by Levy. While people may say it's not the best place to start the Levy journey but I had super fun with it & won't have it any other way. I have so much to say but for now will rest my case with these brilliant words of Levy

"What else are wars for except wounding? What else are words for except to press on a wound?"

Let Levy's words press on yours

Read it & still have the best fun with the most special writing

Thank you Netgalley and Hamish Hamilton for advance review arc

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading about art, artists and writers isn’t my favourite thing to do, and so a lot of this went over my head - i prefer to read/ digest and appreciate artwork firsthand.

But there were moments that struck me in this book, and I always like how Levy’s writing can swing so quickly between being deeply profound (intentionally or unintentionally) and being wry and to the point.

I’m probably not the target audience of this book but I appreciated little moments in it nonetheless. Also learnt a lot about Stein and her philosophies which I found interesting, though I think I’d struggle with her actual work.


‘I unwrapped the oozing baguette and devoured it there and then amongst the dead. The living have appetites. Desires. To drive us mad. To make us joyful. To make us cry. To lead us up the wrong path and down the right path. The dead have done all that. The dead who can no longer feel the rain had spent a lifetime creating themselves.’


‘When I told Fanny I like reading books I don't understand, she said, 'Why not have some sex you don't understand?’’

‘Meanwhile, rain was falling gently on Paris, including on all its trees and statues and on every caress at a bus stop and on every kiss by a fountain.’

[Gaby · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️

I love it when my favourite author releases a new book!! But! even though I enjoyed this one, I've enjoyed many of her other works even more. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn more about Gertrude Stein through this book, which contains some beautiful writing.

All to say: It has a cat, modernism, Paris and a queer icon to learn about, what more could you want?

•••
‘Meanwhile, rain was falling gently on Paris, including on all its trees and statues and on every caress at a bus stop and on every kiss by a fountain.’

‘I listened in.
No bells were ringing.
I could hear birds and the hum of traffic and rain falling on the trees and falling on the dead of Père Lachaise. The dead who can no longer feel the rain or suffer or search for love and fame or turn up drunk for dinner and be pushed down the stairs by their host.’

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first Levy and definitely not my last. This was absolutely everything I could possibly want in a novel. I’m just upset it took me so long to read any of her work.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m levinating

[McKenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Gertrude Stein. Naming herself as a genius was a stroke of genius. Everyone would argue about it for ever.”

Deborah Levy writes about women in the most nuanced and poignant and refreshing way- this is no exception. A beautiful portrait of Gertrude Stein’s life and her breaking free from societal expectations, but also about contemporary life and current struggles with dating, politics, friendships, and feeling lost

I genuinely am so sad this is over I want to read it again

[Maarten]

3,5*

[Marit · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5

ik denk niet dat ik nu iets van Gertrude Stein zou willen lezen, maar jongens, wat een boek! Parijs, identiteit, modernisme, een kat, ik heb genoten.

[Sarah Foulc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the autobiography and not much else… until this one! Perfect

[annabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This genre defying novel unfolds through two interwoven narrative structures that we move in and out of throughout the book: the author’s essay on Gertrude Stein and her experience writing that essay while spending a year in Paris alongside two friends, one looking for her missing cat and the other navigating the complexities of her polyamorous relationships.

Having known almost nothing about Gertrude Stein prior to reading this, I admittedly entered the novel far more interested in Levy’s quotidian life in Paris and the dynamics between her and her friends. But I unexpectedly found myself utterly enamored with Stein herself (her eccentricities, relationships, intellectual circles, and artistic ambitions). While I still struggle to fully comprehend some of her more radically avant garde works, particularly the poetry, I still remain fascinated by Levy’s attempt to understand them.

Levy writes early in the novel, “Muses are a projection, a delusion without needs or biography (what do we know about the families of female muses?).” The novel itself feels like an attempt to resist that very flattening. Levy traces not only Stein herself but also the lives, relationships, families, works, and artistic circles of those orbiting her, as well as those living parallel intellectual and artistic lives.

Through Stein, Levy strings together seminal artists, intellectuals, writers, and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries in a manner reminiscent of Virginia Woolf or perhaps Stein herself: associative, fluid, perpetually digressive, moving almost like the Seine river. The prose is short, incisive, and deceptively effortless as it moves from cultural criticism to intimate biographical detail, from artistic movements to domestic minutiae.

Stream of consciousness writing is usually hit or miss for me, but here it feels perfectly suited to the kind of intellectual and emotional rabbit hole Levy invites the reader into. It becomes genuinely fascinating to see how the lives of artists and thinkers who shaped their respective fields intertwine once you begin looking into their friendships, romances, creative influences, and social circles.

What I found especially compelling is Levy’s ability to wander into seemingly irrelevant tangents only to reveal a couple of lines later that they were never irrelevant at all. Perhaps I found this so delightful because it mirrors the way my own neurodivergent mind functions. When an idea settles somewhere in my subconscious, I find myself continuously tracing new associations and connections to it throughout the day.

This novel exceeded my expectations. I derived immense pleasure from Levy’s rendering of quotidian life in Paris as a writer: the cafés she frequents, the food she purchases, the meals shared among friends, the quiet rhythms of an intellectual life unfolding alongside artistic inquiry. There is something so intimate and charming about the way she writes about inhabiting a city.

The book also feels like an ode to lovers of literature, art, and cultural history in many ways. I adored the dense network of references and connections between canonical writers, artists, philosophers, and thinkers. Reading it often felt less like following a conventional narrative and more like falling down an endless web of artistic and intellectual connections in the best way.

Levy’s writing is genuinely incredible. I found myself repeatedly wondering how she even arrives at writing in this manner, not merely prose wise but structurally as well.

I can’t entirely pinpoint why this charmed me as much as it did, but the cumulative effect of all these elements together worked so well for me that I have no choice but to give it five stars. You know a book has thoroughly consumed you when you keep interrupting your partner’s day to read passages aloud and every passage somehow spirals into a rabbit hole discussion afterward.

Oh, I also immediately went to the store and bought raclette after finishing this book.

💌 Thank you to the publisher for the copy! All opinions are my own as a stingy 5 start giver.

[Cristiano · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely love Deborah Levy and alls she writes. Here she tries to bring together her fiction (a story of three women, who became friends in Paris, one of them writing about Gertrude Stein) and her Living Autobiography writings together. The book compiles lovely quotes taken from Gertrude Stein‘s writing and others and meditations on her life.
I sometimes struggled to see both the fictional and con-fiction sections as equal and was not fully satisfied with either section.
That being said, I still enjoyed all of Deborah Levy‘s insights and wish I could have stayed a bit longer in either world.

Thank you NetGalley for the digital review copy

[beaavargash · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is it?
The wind, what is it.
This book, what is it?

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted my essay to be a clear stream, but there was so much going on. A lost cat, Eva’s missing husband, the vast menu of Fanny’s erotic conquests, finding my way around Paris, the temptation to put down Stein’s writing and read Georges Simenon instead. The streams were flowing through the nineteenth century into the twenty-first and all over the place. Were they streams of consciousness? For some reason I felt the need to defend Gertrude Stein. Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.

In the TLS's twenty questions, when asked what author or book she thought was most underrated, Levy replied: "Gertrude Stein. Her prose is baffling, beguiling, boring, brilliant – in equal measure. All students of Modernism should be pointed to her writing. It took me a while to understand the ways in which her long psychology training at Radcliffe College (under the tutorship of William James) was put to work in all her books."

And in 2020 in the Guardian, Levy said that "Gertrude Stein changed the way I thought about writing autobiography because she so magnificently investigates the art and artifice of the genre", crediting The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as influencing her own living autobiographies trilogy.

I'm not sure how much, if any, of 'My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein' is autobiographical, but in it Levy creatively uses the novel form to essentially write an essay on Stein's time in Paris.

The ostensible framing device of the novel has the first-person narrator, a published author who is, in her words, 'not entirely British', living in Paris researching an essay on Stein. It opens in November 2024, with the US election approaching, with the author's friend Eva calling to say that her cat has gone missing.

The whole drama, which was a tragedy for Eva, was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all. Stein had put so much in my way. In the way of understanding. She didn’t believe in it. Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops. She longed for readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found. She was ashamed of her bestselling autobiography because it was so understandable. When I look at photographs of her, I cannot get into her eyes. Sometimes I had to remind myself of the basic facts, so lost was I in the swirl of information about her.

Which allows the author (both Levy and the fictional one) to then revert to Stein's biography and also comment extensively on her work and her pivotal part in the modernist movement in both literature and art.

Her wish to kill the nineteenth century still leaves an afterglow of radical resistance in our own century. How did she kill the nineteenth century? With her pen. After writing her more conventional early trio of novellas, Three Lives, she poked her pen under the bonnet of the nineteenth century and whipped it off. And then she set to work on the shawl.

In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, written in 1815, Miss Bates (described wittily by Austen as ‘a great talker upon little matters’) insists that her mother wear a shawl when she goes visiting.
[...]
Stein killed this nineteenth-century shawl in her collection of prose poems, Tender Buttons, published in 1914.

Tender Buttons is a key reference point for the novel, alongside many of her other works, which the novel quotes from at regular interviews, as well as from many other modernist writers, Woolf in particular.

The line from Tender Buttons "The wind, what is it" seems to be one key reference point - and the phrase "lost it" (e.g. Eva refers to her cat as 'it' although one of Eva's friends renamed it Bob) and "What is it?" reoccur through the novel, although Stein's original formulation did not include a question mark:

She had a science training and possessed a scholarly grip on grammar, yet removed all question marks from her work because she said it was obvious when something is a question. She found them revolting. And she thought commas were servile. Readers should be free to take a breath whenever they felt like it. Her main aim was for a sentence to push onwards.

‘A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it . . .’
Lectures in America (1935) by Gertrude Stein

The framing device of the Paris plot - the lost cat and the tangled love lives of the author's friends - is rather insubstantial and told in an arch tone, although the descriptions of cheese and pâtisseries made me want to return to the City. And Levy/the narrator's attempt to link Stein's work to modern politics, such as Trump and (unnamed) wars - Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself - felt rather unsuccessful, largely due to the frivolity of the modern plot.

But as an essay on Stein and the 20th century modernists' welcome dismantling of the 19th century novel, this was a success, and the framing device does make it a fun and accessible read rather than an academic tone.

3.5 stars rounded to 4.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet, is that not what literature is for? To search the hills for greater meaning hiding in plain sight?

Deborah Levy on Gertrude Stein? Absolutely irresistible!

It's interesting that the very title insists on this being fiction as the voice reminded me throughout of that in Levy's living biography series that started with Things I Don't Want to Know. There's a similar intimacy, a sense of the lively mind behind the words, the adventurousness (here living in Paris for a year), the wit and the pressing, probing intelligence that makes connections as it roves over divergent material.

While the narrator is in Paris researching an essay on Stein, the book itself explores almost-contemporary Paris and the friendship of three women there: Eva, Fanny and the narrator herself. The narrative coalesces around ideas of what is lost, a refrain throughout the book: a cat, a potential love interest, but also the things that need to be lost in order for the self to come into its own: Alice B. Toklas' obligated smile, Stein's acceptance of society's rules for women and what femininity is supposed to look and behave like.

Stein ends up a kind of muse for the narrator's own meditations on her relationships with the other women, with her work, with writing and with that sense of the self as a being always under construction, losing and building, moment by moment. That may sound earnest but this book isn't even while it deals with the crux of what living a good life might mean: it's humorous and engaged, as interested in red-soled stilettos and French cheeses and home-made peach brandy (from an Alice B. Toklas recipe) as it is in more serious matters - indeed, it gently asserts that the serious aspects of life are constructed from these small everyday interests and concerns, that friendships and relationship are embedded in cigarettes tucked into a belt, shared meals and bickering over the name of a lost cat.

This is exactly the sort of book that Levy writes so well: I can see myself coming back to this again in the future, as more will be uncovered on repeat readings.

Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

This book is about a character who is trying to write an essay about Gertrude Stein. It’s a bit of a paradox, really, because it feels like I read a story about Deborah Levy figuring out a way to write about Gertrude Stein for herself, which she’s done in a very creative way.

The story itself is sort of split in two. The fictional half is held up by an unnamed English author living in Paris who is almost going a little mad trying to understand the writer, Gertrude Stein. It’s there she befriends two women: Eva, a Danish expat whose husband is building them a home in Seattle while she finishes her graphic novel, and Fanny, a French polyamorous financial advisor. Together, the three of them cook, make a life in Paris and discuss art, sex and politics, while looking for Eva’s missing cat.

Then, there’s the biographical side. Where one page or chapter will be rooted in the present day (sometime around 2024), the next transports you into the work and world of Gertrude Stein in the early 1900s, quite aptly delivering a detailed account of her life and who she was, despite being buried in the pages of what is labelled “a fiction”. Despite that, I found that I learned a lot about her, actually.

I felt like I learned more about Levy as well. One line that stuck with me was – “she considered paragraphs to be more emotional than sentences” – because I’ve always found Levy’s writing to be most powerful in large passages. Her sentences are actually quite simple in structure, but her writing as a whole feels incredibly complicated. Take this book, for example. It’s fiction, it’s non-fiction, it’s a biography inside a story, it’s a book about Gertrude Stein told through someone trying to write a book about Gertrude Stein, it’s very meta. It’s Levy creeping out and beyond the boundaries of genre.

The character in this book says something about spending years trying to understand Gertrude Stein. I feel the same with Levy.

The end of the book drives this point home. It reads, “Gertrude Stein was a big presence, but I don’t think anyone can ever get to the bottom of it.” Deborah Levy, you’re a little to me what I think Gertrude Stein is to your protagonist.

(reviewing more over at https://substack.com/@daisyhenry and https://www.instagram.com/second____t... if you'd like to join me there)

[Chris L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In ‘My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein’, award-winning writer Deborah Levy fashions a crazy hybrid of quasi-biography/fiction about a narrator wanting to write an essay about the brilliant writer Gertrude Stein. Levy shows us a writer who grapples with stains writing and how to approach that writing in her essay. Meanwhile, her friend Eva deals with the disappearance of her cat and these two narrative threads make up the makeshift plot of love Levy’s new novel.

Levy has always been playful with narrative form and how she uses that structure to amplify the themes in her story. In this novel she's looking at how Gertrude Stein wanted to kill off the 19th century and move into the more modern twentieth century. In amplifying this particular message, Levy has created dual narrative threads where she tells a fictional story of a narrator and her two friends looking for a cat and in the other, she writes about Gertrude Stein’s life and work.

The narrator wants to reclaim Stein even if she does not have the words or ability to write the essay.
The narrator’s friends, Fanny and Eva serve as sounding boards for the work in progress but also as stand-ins for the readers. They ask the questions that many of us would ask if we were compelled to discuss Gertrude Stein. They also serve as a way to show that how we construct a narrative or give meaning to a story is not always telling the truth. We only see them through the narrator’s opinions and recollections.

Levy consistently hammers home the point of lost opportunities and untapped potential for women in the 19th and 20th centuries because of their biology. Gertrude Stein had to placate a less intelligent brother because most societies were built upon sexist notions of male/female intelligence. She always resented having to dampen her accomplishments in order to make peace with her brother.
I can see where this might not work for everyone, but I had a good time with this delicious novel. ‘My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein’ works as a literary puzzle to savour and return to on cold, rainy days, especially if you’re on the lookout for a lost cat.

[Charlie Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars.

In the last few weeks I have had my poor, simple brain beaten in by the works of two staggeringly talented women. I am not sure yet how I feel about both of these works. In time I will recover.

"You will write about the avant-garde in the language of realism. The push and pull of both constituencies will be confronting.”

A cat of one of three friends goes missing. They orbit each other in their loose support system, exploring Paris, postmodernism, and millennial haze. Where other writers end up with Perfection or a pale imitation of Rooney, Levy explores a preceding unravelling and coping with the death of another -modernism. She explores Steins legacy and art, and in her characters attempt to understand the works of Stein, they find some meaning to their own parallel lives.

"If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein's project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language.”

Levy is equipped to square up to Stein, her prose semiotic-ridden and deftly surreal. Her characters explore the similiarity with how Stein grappled with her past century, she "wanted to kill the nineteenth century./ The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself." In this cosmic-suicide (too grandiose?) her sketched characters still find means of extant amelioration through the everyday; lovers, food, work, pets, locale. It's light, but the backdrop to the dizzying circling of Gertrude Stein is a story of normalcy.

It seems a logical extension of the mode of August Blue, itself an extension of Hot Milk. The vignettes shorten, sharpen, become... grounds for the coexisting of the surreal and mundance. A porthole view of essence. I felt the most comfortable with the middle ground of AB, but I have enjoyed my time with Gertrude Stein and what Levy has added to this.

"… all modernist art was the enemy./ Why was it degenerate?/ It had lost it./ Lost what?/ Representation. Naturalism. Nostalgia. Obedience. Conformity. Certainty.”

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
By Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy is a wonderful writer—and also a versatile one who has written plays and poetry as well fiction. I especially love her “living autobiographies”—the triology of Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate. Reading Levy is like reading a reflection of what I would write—I only I had her talent and skill.

I am happy to say the her soon-to-be published book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction is another beautiful book. I enjoyed everything about the book: the writing of course, the characters and all the references to Gertrude Stein. It probably helps that I also love Stein (and coincidentally was reading some of Stein’s work for a class I’m taking) but I think that appreciating Stein is not a requirement for appreciating Levy’s book. The ways in which she integrates Stein’s writing and life into the story of a young woman writing her paper (of course on Stein) in Paris while negotiating the friendships of two women and searching for the lost cat of one of them are fun as well as fascinating. And I love how her quotes of Stein are presented as understandable and how they illuminate the rest of the work.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction is successful in many ways. I love how Levy uses Stein’s words and life to reflect the narrator’s current situation and the relationships as well as the ways I was able to use the author’s use of Stein to ignite my own thoughts and raise questions in myself about the world and my own life.

I admit the use of Stein was my favorite aspect of the novel but all the rest was interesting and engaging as well.

As usual, Levy does not disappoint and I strongly recommend this novel to . . . well, just about everyone.

Thank you to NetGalley who provided me with an advance copy of this work and to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux and of course to the author in exchange for an honest review. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction will be published on June 2, 2026.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many thanx to Netgalley and FS&G for the ARC in exchange for this fair and honest review!

Well, it's Deborah Levy, who I'm on record as being one of my all-time fave authors (I've read literally everything she's published!) - so I was pre-disposed to love this as well! But must admit it took me awhile to cozy up to it; even for Ms. L. this is ... well ... 'out there'.

She calls it 'A Fiction', so let's accept that on face-value - but it is some odd-ball amalgamation of novel, essay, auto-fiction, quotation montage, pastiche, biography, and probably a lot of other categories yet to be invented.

The opening chapters are somewhat reminiscent of Rachel Cusk, with the unnamed narrator detailing her year-long sojourn in Paris, primarily with the gal-pals she meets there, Fanny and Eve, while researching and composing an essay on Stein, and searching for Eva's lost cat.

Along the way, we get the benefits of her research and pensées about the author, along with generous dollops of quotations from Gertrude herself, and others of her acquaintance about her. Much of this has to do with what it means to be an untethered female genius, then and now.

About midway, it all starts to come together, but never completely; as always, Levy favors open-ended conclusions. There is, however, a very clever 'twist' on the penultimate page. reflecting back on the chosen epigraph, that I found surprising and completely satisfying.

I was hoping this might earn Levy the much-deserved Booker that has somehow eluded her, after three worthy nominations (and it well might!) - but I suspect this will irritate as many people as it enthralls - and might be better suited to something like the Goldsmiths Prize.

It's a quick-paced book that almost demands more than one read-through, so I am sure I will come back to it, once I've had time to mull. But nevertheless - brava!

[Katharine Bubbear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a genre bending, fast-paced and witty novel - an ode to Paris, an exploration of friendship, a window into sexuality and history and art. And most of all, a love letter to Gertrude Stein, a knowingly unsuccessful attempt to condense her life and works into a palatable and understandable narrative.

The novel follows Levy’s nameless narrator who is attempting to write about Gertrude Stein - avant-garde American poet, queer icon, art collector and (self-styled) genius who has made her home in Paris with her wife Alice B Toklas. She is described as the godmother of modernism, and both her own writing and Levy’s reflect this throughout the novel.

Our narrator tries to navigate the connection between anxiety, rootless existences, language, modernity, sexuality and Gertrude Stein, as well as how these relate to her own life in the 21st century. Stein breaks away from the limits of the 19th century, sharing her unique world view through her art - and Levy does exactly this with this piece of work, defying the predictable rules of biographical writing and instead creating a tender portrait of both Stein and her modern characters.

Can I say that I truly understood the format and the narrative? Absolutely not. But as one of Levy’s characters herself says: “I like reading books I don’t understand”. My three stars are more of a reflection on my inability as a reader to fully immerse myself in such genre bending fiction, than they are a comment on Levy’s skill. I did love reading this, despite my lack of understanding - Levy is a beautiful writer, and she knew exactly what she was doing with this novel. I just wish I knew too. But I think that might be the point…

[Linda Lefler · Rating 4 out of 5]

MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN. In which I out myself as not a serious student of literature... I have never been able to finish a book by Virginia Woolf sorry. Barely recognized the name Stein. Writers of the lost generation? What about the time I lost when I was forced to read Hemingway in school? I really hope they still don't teach it. So dick forward. Ford Madox Ford and F. Scott Fitzgerald I have a little more time for. I was also woefully ignorant of the distinguished oeuvre of Deborah Levy. So I went in expecting this book to be, y'know, kind of a Julie and Julia, or My Year With Oprah.

This book, in the manner of the modernists, offers our heroine, an expat from an anglophone region who is working on an essay about Gertrude Stein and hanging out with gal pals of puzzlingly alienated demeanor in contemporary Paris. We are privy to her learnings and questions about Stein and some of her works, and can trace a little story line, but this book doesn't feel it has to do anything coherent. There is a missing cat and perhaps someone has been less than honest about where the cat came from. There are non sequiturs galore. I enjoyed it for what it was, and appreciated the defiance of genre. Even as a bull in this literary china shop I could grasp the artistry. I believe it would enchant someone who was already a fan of that era of rebellious writers and artists, and/or of Levy herself.

Personally, I am trying to figure out how to write a contemporary fictional character grappling with the legacy of a historical heroine. On that level, I felt I learned a few things, too. Thanks to Netgalley, the author, and publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux for this e -copy in return for an honest review.

[Emily Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Levy explores very interestingly Stein’s background in psychology to try to pinpoint the path that brought Stein to what became Modernism in literature. Namely citing William James’s Principles of Psychology where he insisted the most useful consciousness is ‘found in personal consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s’

Levy’s protagonist (arguably a persona of Levy herself) is extensively theoretical around the origin of stream of consciousness - its truthfulness and transparency versus its excess - which is such a clear and accessible way to understanding Modernism, not just Stein. She speaks to modern day issues that have not progressed much since the early 20th century, striking clear comparisons between the world for women, patriarchy, war, dislocation, relationships etc with brilliance.

The very fine line between fact and fiction (and the elements of Levy’s own living biography) in this novel makes it confusing to navigate at times, especially when the many executed Modernist techniques have you searching for a missed chapter... But I loved it all... Repetition, aloofness, vagueness, humour, chaos, alienation is all there, creating this self conscious comparison of person and writing between the protagonist and Stein, protagonist and Levy, and, Levy and Stein - their place in the world, the arts, as women, etc. all comes together (if it can be described that way) into this constant under construction / deconstruction of self that encourages introspection throughout.

I flew through this novel in hours and will forever long to be able to read it for the first time again

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75

Deborah Levy's My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein sits between homage and imaginative reconstruction, offering a reflective, sometimes playful take on literacy legacy. Rather than strict realism, Levy embraces a fluid, dreamlike approach to Stein as both figure and influence - an intriguing idea that doesn't always fully come together.

At its strongest, the book captures the texture of artistic life with sharp, insightful prose, particularly when it leans into essay-like reflections on creativity and identity. The narrative can feel uneven and lacking momentum, and Stein herself remains elusive - but this also feels fitting. Given how avant-garde and often opaque Stein's own work was, that sense of distance may be less a flaw and more an intentional echo of her style and legacy.

Still, it's a thoughtful and stylistically elegant work. Not entirely satisfying but interesting enough to justify a 3.75.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Kristi Hovington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know what i can write about Deborah Levy that i haven’t written before; I think I’ve now read everything she’s published. I’ve met her twice and had a conversation with her about Virginia Woolf (a dream come true!), a writer important to both of us. Levy is the only living writer who reminds me of Woolf, and this book absolutely furthers that belief.

I love her writing so much, whether she’s writing about food, missing cats, friends, lovers, wars, or art. This book is interesting to me, particularly because it reads like her non-fiction, almost like a 4th living autobiography. The scene where the narrator is on a lunch date with an older American literature teacher in a Parisian cafe is just perfection.

There are so many flags and annotations in my copy, but my favorite is:
“All the same, Virginia Woolf, born six years after Gertrude Stein, is the writer I have found most encouraging in every phase of life.

She thought so deeply. For me.

And what about Gertrude stein?

She thought deeply.”

Deborah Levy thinks so deeply. For me.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to FSG and NetGalley for an eARC of this title, to be published June 2, 2026.
It has been awhile since I have read Levy, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy her. Insightful, casual, and humorous.
This is fiction, or autofiction, on Levy writing an essay on Stein while living in Paris, as recently as 2024. She is friends with 2 French women, and I am not sure if they are real, or fictional.
But the threesome's (not in the usual, sexual, connotation) story, and the commentary on Stein, blend well.
Hmm, I had never thought about that perhaps William James "understood" Stein better than most because of his sister, Alice. James was instrumental in her going off to study medicine at Johns Hopkins.
There were some other "Aha!" moments in here, and a nice plot twist to the three women at the end.
Now I have a problem - do I want to go read more Levy, Stein, or books about Stein?
4.5 out of 5.