Ada

by Gertrude Stein

Ada (in Short Story Collection Vol. 049 )

One evening in the winter, some years ago, my brother came to my rooms
in the city of Chicago bringing with him a book by Gertrude Stein. The
book was called Tender Buttons and, just at that time, there was a
good deal of fuss and fun being made over it in American newspapers. I
had already read a book of Miss Stein's called Three Lives and had
thought it contained some of the best writing ever done by an American.
I was curious about this new book.

My brother had been at some sort of a gathering of literary people on
the evening before and someone had read aloud from Miss Stein's new
book. The party had been a success. After a few lines the reader stopped
and was greeted by loud shouts of laughter. It was generally agreed that
the author had done a thing we Americans call "putting something
across"--the meaning being that she had, by a strange freakish
performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself
discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried,
harried lives.

My brother, as it turned out, had not been satisfied with the
explanation of Miss Stein's work then current in America, and so he
bought Tender Buttons and brought it to me, and we sat for a time
reading the strange sentences. "It gives words an oddly new intimate
flavor and at the same time makes familiar words seem almost like
strangers, doesn't it," he said. What my brother did, you see, was to
set my mind going on the book, and then, leaving it on the table, he
went away.

And now, after these years, and having sat with Miss Stein by her own
fire in the rue de Fleurus in Paris I am asked to write something by way
of an introduction to a new book she is about to issue.

Genres: Poetry, Comics, Graphic Novels, Classics, Art

MP3 CD

First published January 1, 1910

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

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful comics I've ever read. The Berlin artist Atak is a new name to me, but I'm convinced he's a genius. The illustrations are to die for. It's an attack on your visuals. Short and sweet, yet what literary critics call 'endlessly entertaining.' Inventive adaptation of the Gertrude Stein poem, sheds some light on an interesting woman in history, Stein's 'first lady,' Alice B. Toklas. The comic was created in 2005, but it honestly reads like it could have been published in 1910 (when the poem was written), or any time in the past century. It's psychedelic in its daintiness. I can't say enough good things about it. It's poignant, colorful, and odd. It's a piece of art.

[dianne b. · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a sweet romantic surprise. What is more romantic than being listened to? What is more authentic proof of love? i value your thoughts.

First a daughter "who also was successful enough in being one being living". She, happy with her mother who had "always told very pretty stories to each other", even when they didn't get it right, with forgiveness and love.

The illustrations in this edition evoking Dia de los Muertos and the Mad Hatters Tea Party to represent the various Old Men who came to live and die, or die and live and die with Ada's family are almost up to the words (which are there to honor Alice B. T.)

But after mother's passing life, well, "she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them". There was some saying of nothing, some tenderness, other sayings of nothing with her father. Ada, due to the resources left to her by her grandfather, can leave and live on her own and find "Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening...
(to) stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending."

And then it gets even better.
Maybe ABT and GS had the perfect love.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

tender

[Lorena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent.