Audiobook Review Praises Deborah Levy's 'My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein'

A new audiobook review published by The Guardian has praised Deborah Levy's "My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein" as a "gripping vision of a fearless writer," according to the publication.

The book, described in the review as inventive and perfectly paced, follows a fictional unnamed British author living in Paris in late 2024 who attempts to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the American-born modernist writer and art collector, according to the Guardian excerpt.

According to the review, the narrator's efforts are complicated by a subplot involving her friend Eva's missing cat, whose name is stylized in lowercase as "it," leading to comic confusion among the narrator's circle of friends. Another friend, Fanny, reportedly renames the cat Bob to simplify conversations about the animal, the review states.

The review recounts biographical details of Stein, noting she was born in Pennsylvania, was painted by Pablo Picasso, and socialized with Ernest Hemingway. Stein wrote experimental, stream-of-consciousness prose that, according to the review, predated James Joyce's work on Ulysses.

Despite her early innovations, the review notes that commercial success eluded Stein until she was in her 60s, when she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a biography of her life partner that is considered one of her more accessible works.

The review describes the novel's narrator as an admirer of Stein's writing who nonetheless finds it exasperating at times. The narrator is quoted in the source material as saying, "Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops," adding that Stein "longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found."

The full review was published by The Guardian's books section on September 17, 2026.