User:DeRossitt/Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice is a 2007 book by journalist and writer Janet Malcolm, about the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Vichy France.

Overview
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Reception
Anne Charles in the NWSA Journal: An expansion of Malcolm's important New Yorker article, "Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas got to Heaven," Two Lives is also a journalistic foray into the work of Gertrude Stein, examining such novels as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and The Making of Americans and introducing actual Stein scholars as fellow detectives in Malcolm's investigation of critical and archival material. This presenta tion of literal critics is only one way the book departs from the conventions of traditional biography. Two Lives contains no bibliography (though works of criticism are mentioned in the text), no index, no introduction and no conclusion. In addition, the pattern of organization is anything but chronological.

Catharine R. Stimpson in The American Scholar: As information inundates the 21st-century world, and the categories of knowledge that organize information shiver and crack and change, it becomes more and more imperative to say why something matters, why we should bother with it. Two Lives reflects on modern storytelling, literature, creativity, reputation and memories, love and sexuality, and Jewish responses to the habits and horrors of the anti- Semite and anti-Semitism.

Mimi Chubb in ''The Threepenny Review': magnificent new book of literary journalism ... What I love most about Two Lives, though, is the way in which it refuses to let you merely snuggle up with the lush but schematic insights it enables. Malcolm chews over what it means to read Stein and Toklas—and, more broadly, what it means to craft and to control biography—with extraordinary nuance. In probing Toklas's and Stein's own subversions of biography, Malcolm adopts their transgressive spirit. Two Lives is an anti-biography of two masters of anti-biography.

Brooke Allen in The Wilson Quarterly: But Two Lives is not really a work of journalism; it is an uneasy mixture of essay and reportage that lacks a unifying idea or direction. Malcolm includes her by-now-familiar philosophic digressions on the elusiveness of truth, the control of nar- rative, and the nature of biography. "Biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell." There is nothing too surprising in this. She goes on: The biographer "turns the bracing storyless- ness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography." Why bracing? Why flaccid? Couldn't the two adjectives just as easily be switched around? But the nature of biography is not really Malcolm's subject in Two Lives, and it's not really clear what is. It's hard to figure out what Malcolm is trying to achieve with this book, or what originally sparked her interest in two women she doesn't even seem to like very much.