The autobiography of alice b toklas reviews
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas from Gertrude Stein Writings
bygd GERTRUDE STEIN
The Library Of America
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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS
I.
Before I Came to Paris
I was born in San Francisco, California. inom have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it. My mother's father was a pioneer, he came to California in '49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music. She was a pupil of Clara Schumann's father. My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.
My father came of polish patriotic stock. His grand-uncle raised a regiment for Napoleon and was its colonel. His father left his mother just after their marriage, to fight at the barricades in Paris, but his wife having cut off his supplies, he soon returned and led the life of a conservative well to do land owner.
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Gertrude Stein writes her own autobiography, from the perspective of her partner, Alice B. Toklas. A wealthy American in Paris, Gertrude Stein acts as a patron of the arts, as well as working on her own writing, and her dead-pan descriptions of various artists, as well as the creative process, are often very wry and amusing. I enjoyed most of this book, but at times became bogged down in the parade of artists, intellectuals, writers, and others. The narrative is an interesting mixture of chaos and hedonism, with wry asides about Paris, Americans, and various nationalities. I felt that Stein's narrative voice let her down when she was writing about World War 1: her deadpan style loses its charm, and the sense that the Americans are treating the War as a lark, of which they are disinterested observers, is strange and jarring.
This book is fascinatingly queer: though the partnership between Alice and Gertrude
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is an engaging and somewhat strange book. It is, actually, the autobiography of Gertrude Stein, but written from the perspective of her partner/lover/wife*, Alice Toklas, as if it is her autobiography. Even though it isn&#;t, because it&#;s about Stein rather than about her.
I&#;ll be honest, the above paragraph makes it sound more complicated than it is.
Gertrude Stein, if you don&#;t know who she is, was an influential art collector, writer and socialite (that&#;s probably the wrong word), who lived in Paris throughout much of the first half of the 20th century. Essentially, she was friends with everyone of any cultural-artistic importance. Recurring characters in this book (and her life) include Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau&#; And characters who turn up and are mentioned once include James Joyce, Paul Bowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others who,