Two lives. Gertrude and Alice.

229 p. : ill. ; 20 x 14 cm. "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate “marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. . Legatura editoriale, coperta in cartone rigido con mezza tela di colore blu, titolo impresso in oro al dorso, muto il piatto. Sovraccoperta in carta patinata opaca con alette, dorso della sovraccoperta illustrato con fotografie in b/n di Gertrude Stein e Alice B. Toklas. Volume ottimamente conservato. Codice libreria 3465.