Purchase

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Add to Wish List

Also by Janet Malcolm:

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, September 2008
Paperback
Two Lives, October 2007
Hardcover

TWO LIVES
By: Janet Malcolm

Gertrude and Alice

Yale University Press
October 2007
On Sale: September 27, 2007
240 pages
ISBN: 0300125518
EAN: 9780300125511
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction

“How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate “marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes.

The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.

Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. “Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. “The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning—you need a crowbar for that—but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

Media Buzz

Fresh Air - NPR - September 18, 2007