Lucy Church Amiably (American Literature)

Lucy Church Amiably (American Literature)

Nothing much happens in the book. It would be impossible to prepare an outline of the plot (as opposed, say, to?"The Making of Americans"). The action is purely interior: a great deal is noticed, digested, absorbed, compared. The result can be read simply as an account of being in the countryside, or more complexly, as an investigation into the interlocking nature of things and into the ways that language can be used for description.?"Lucy Church Amiably"?is finally, in Miss Stein's own words, "A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving." There is no summarizing or explaining the writings of Gertrude Stein. With the exception of her fledgling efforts like Three Lives or her funny, successful memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , her fictions are without conventional plot, setting, or character. They are intellectual flowers, each sentence growing or receding from the one before it, repeating its main points with subtle, telling changes. In Lucy Church Amiably , first published in Paris in 1930 and long out of print, Stein describes the landscape and pastoral life of central France (while writing, she was staying near a small village named Lucy) in and through her character Lucy Church: "Gradually remembering a lake. Gradually. Remembering. A lake. In gradually remembering a lake by the shore of the lake where they were sitting." Yet Stein is not opaque or purely musical: she always provides solid details in unexpected places, specializing, as the critic Fred Dupee put it, in "the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense." She is a central figure in the modernist movement, but her relentless pleasure in her quirky, handmade idiom can repel the unwary reader. Although it is a delight to have this reprint, a brief introduction would have been useful for the uninitiated. Those interested in Stein should also turn to her Selected Writings , or, for a painless entrée to her work, begin with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . --Regina Marler This 1927 title is one of Stein's lesser-known works. Written during the magical age of the Paris expatriates, it was a vanity publication, as were most of her books, but made very little impression. It returned in 1969, and again barely caused a ripple, perhaps because it doesn't really have any plot to speak of but is more of Stein's automatic writing and repetition of images. Stein has almost become a literary cult figure, with a steady following, so libraries would be wise to invest in this volume. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. "Gertrude was always right." -- Ernest Hemingway "None of her contemporaries has her intellectual reach, few her persistence and devotion." -- William H. Gass "The magnum opus before us is a volume from the grave of literature." -- George Currie, Brooklyn Eagle "The purest and best pastoral romance we have had in this century." -- Donald Sutherland, author of GERTRUDE STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY OF HER WORK Gertrude Stein (1874 1946) was born in Pittsburgh to a prosperous German-Jewish family. She was educated in France and the United States, worked under the pioneering psychologist William James, and later studied medicine. With her brother Leo she was an important patron of the arts, acquiring works by many contemporary artists, most famously Picasso, while her home became a popular meeting place for writers and painters from Matisse to Hemingway. Her books include Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Used Book in Good Condition