Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
First published in 1909, Three Lives is described on the back cover of the Penguin edition that I read as inaugurating "an era of bold experimentation with literary form and language." Part of Stein's aim, it seems, was to adapt the compositional techniques of painters like Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso to literature. Whether any reader would recognize this just from reading the book, without having been tipped off, seems doubtful. I certainly would not, and even after having been tipped off, the blocks of repetition seem pointless and boring, not reminiscent or evocative of Cézanne. In science, as everyone knows, not all experiments are successful and I should think the same would be true in literature, even though some people talk of literary "experimentation" as if it were in itself a virtue. This experiment is a failure.
The edition I read includes an analytical introduction explaining Stein's interests in post-impressionist painting and her wish to adapt its techniques to literature, her disinterest in character development, her admiration for the psychological theories of William James, her choice of lower-class women as her central characters. But none of those things makes the book any better, any more than Beethoven's initial conception of paying homage to Napoleon is what makes the "Eroica" a great symphony.
I found Three Lives to be a bit of a slog. Of the three women described in the three stories, only Melanctha, in the second story, seemed at all interesting. She is a bright, uneducated, poor black southern woman. Unfortunately, the story is marred, constantly, by what seem to us today to be bigoted, racist, and demeaning descriptions of African Americans (that term, of course, does not appear in the story, instead we have "black," "nigger," and occasionally "mulatto"). In all three stories the writing got constantly in the way. The pointless, tiresome repetition, both of whole paragraphs and of phrases and individual words, made it hard for me to go beyond the surface of the prose and take an interest in the women being depicted, nor was anything offered to make me even want to learn more about them. Oddly, there were many places in the text where Stein's use of the present tense, her slightly off-beat descriptions, and her general avoidance of polysyllabic words gave her prose the rhythm of Damon Runyon. She might not like to think of Damon Runyon as a writer whose prose hers resembles, and, in fact, there are few points of similarity. The two writers are very different. The principal difference is that Damon Runyon is amusing.
The edition I read includes an analytical introduction explaining Stein's interests in post-impressionist painting and her wish to adapt its techniques to literature, her disinterest in character development, her admiration for the psychological theories of William James, her choice of lower-class women as her central characters. But none of those things makes the book any better, any more than Beethoven's initial conception of paying homage to Napoleon is what makes the "Eroica" a great symphony.
I found Three Lives to be a bit of a slog. Of the three women described in the three stories, only Melanctha, in the second story, seemed at all interesting. She is a bright, uneducated, poor black southern woman. Unfortunately, the story is marred, constantly, by what seem to us today to be bigoted, racist, and demeaning descriptions of African Americans (that term, of course, does not appear in the story, instead we have "black," "nigger," and occasionally "mulatto"). In all three stories the writing got constantly in the way. The pointless, tiresome repetition, both of whole paragraphs and of phrases and individual words, made it hard for me to go beyond the surface of the prose and take an interest in the women being depicted, nor was anything offered to make me even want to learn more about them. Oddly, there were many places in the text where Stein's use of the present tense, her slightly off-beat descriptions, and her general avoidance of polysyllabic words gave her prose the rhythm of Damon Runyon. She might not like to think of Damon Runyon as a writer whose prose hers resembles, and, in fact, there are few points of similarity. The two writers are very different. The principal difference is that Damon Runyon is amusing.