Best literary fiction out this week: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah
My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein is available now from the Mail Bookshop
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99, 240pp)
Perhaps only Deborah Levy could have written this self-conscious novelette about friendship and the art of biography.
The narrator (we assume Levy) is in Paris to write an essay on the early 20th century modernist writer Gertrude Stein, a sado-masochistic undertaking since she admits to finding her elusive subject ‘baffling’.
Equally baffled by the project are the narrator’s two friends, one of whom is distraught because of her missing cat, named ‘it’ (yes really); the other mired in a complicated love life.
Levy is exploring how writers create themselves through their art (partly by dispensing with punctuation, in Stein’s case) but her book also feels like a lament for a lost era: it’s simply impossible to imagine the same radical circles that Stein lived in existing now. The not always satisfying result is a bit like a cubist painting in book form, if you can imagine such a thing.
Son of Nobody by Yann Martel (Canongate £16.99, 352pp)
Yann Martel could have rested on the laurels of Life Of Pi for the rest of his life and no one would have blamed him. Instead, he is pursuing literary experiments such as this ambitious undertaking about a Canadian academic in Oxford who has discovered a lost Homeric-era poem from a collection of papyrus fragments.
The poem offers an alternative take on the Trojan wars by telling it from the perspective of a commoner rather than a garlanded soldier, and the academic presents it within a long letter to his daughter back in Canada alongside footnotes.
It takes time to get into the flow of this initially confusing set up, but Martel finds enough rewarding connections between his two main characters – both dedicated men many miles from home – to humanise this bravura deconstruction of heroic narratives.
Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99, 256pp)
Sophie Mackintosh is a master of the arresting premise. Previous novels have featured an idyllic French village consumed by hysteria and three sisters brought up on a desert island far away from men.
She’s excelled herself here with a time-slip novel about an adulterous couple who, 18 months into their affair, wake up to find themselves in a parallel city where they can indulge their desires to their hearts’ content.
Like in a fairy tale where the bells chime at midnight, they are soon back in the real world, with all its quotidian concerns and restrictions. But before long they have nailed the art of transporting themselves back to fantasy land at will.
Mackintosh explores the implications, delusions and limitations of desire in its myriad forms in a transfixing novel that elegantly balances profundity and playfulness.