@internrachel, @julia1

This bookclub thing is great. I just read a book that I like a lot. But it also irritated me, so I want to bitch a bit. The book is Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. (229 pages although the pages are really short, it’s really more like 50 regular pages, which is a reason in itself to read it.)

I love Janet Malcolm, I think she’s an amazing writer. A lot of the book is a meditation on the challenges of writing non-fiction, particularly when your subjects are real people. I.e., people and the world are complicated, and coherent and readable narratives tend to flatten that complexity. This was wonderful and thought-provoking reading, subtly done. I really like Malcolm, here and elsewhere, as she is very good at making things both highly read-able while also showing the messiness and complexity of it all.

It was also fun to learn more about Gertrude Stein. I’m totally a non-fiction person, and this book got me curious about Stein’s writing.

Another for sure pro — always nice to read something that’s about a lesbian couple.

SO what irritated me though is that Malcolm spent all this time puzzling through the couple’s jewish identity and their potential complicity/ acquiescence to vichy rule in france/ the holocaust. Malcolm sort of suggests that they are closeted jews, although she also does a nice job of complicating that. But she never takes up the issue of them being this open lesbian couple. Which isn’t simply Malcolm focusing on one thing, as is necessary in a book — one can’t talk about everything — EXCEPT for the fact that it seems highly likely that the way they dealt with being a lesbian couple also informed the way they dealt with being a jewish couple. It seems to me that Stein and Toklas may of manhandled/ bluffed their way through both. Which would have taken a lot of strength and courage. Malcolm often suggests that Stein was simply closing her eyes to what was going on around her, which I think suggests a lot of naivete (and perhaps privilege) on Malcolm’s part.

So that part was super annoying but overall, still worth reading, for sure.