Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography: the
story of the mystifying relationship between the brilliant and
affable Gertrude Stein and her brooding companion, Alice B. Toklas
"Janet Malcolm deftly captures Alice B. Toklas's legendary 40-year
partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein in Two
Lives, clearing up a few mysteries along the way-including how two
Jewish women were able to survive World War II in their provincial
French chateau with the help of a Vichy collaborator."-Vogue
"Shrewd, humane, and beautifully written."- John Gross, Wall Street
Journal "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. Praise for the author: "[Janet Malcolm] is among the
most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn
epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."-David Lehman,
Boston Globe "Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so
trenchantly about the strange art of biography."-Christopher Benfey
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