Levy’s latest novel slips between the past and the present to explore the contemporary condition
Like many of Deborah Levy’s previous novels, her latest uses a temporally confused, unreliable narrator to introduce existential questions. This unfurls through roughly 200 pages of first-person, stream-of-consciousness writing, carried forward through liquid metaphors including Paris’s anticipated centennial flood, a warm bath and melted Raclette cheese.
The narrator has travelled to Paris to research the American-turned-Parisian Gertrude Stein. The novel’s slippery narrative flows back and forth between the early twentieth century of the celebrated writer and collector, and the autumn of Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, often letting the two suggestively blur. This temporal mixing largely emerges from the narrator’s unspoken fantasy about being a twentieth-century Parisian intellectual – she misnames (in writing) her date ‘Jean-Luc’ as ‘Jean-Paul’, shortly after writing about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – though it also brings to the surface the idea that the two eras share a violence and drive to totalitarianism.
The narrator, like the rest of us, doesn’t have the benefit of retrospect to help her analyse the present moment. So as ‘advertisements for vitamins, automobiles and life insurance’ interrupt ‘news of the wars’ that she watches on her phone, she throws herself into her research, using her subjective interpretations of Stein’s work and life as a pretext to question herself and her context. Her obsession with investigating how Steincame to be an active agent in bringing about modernity betrays her own anxieties about her lack of agency in the present. ‘Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself,’ she writes.
Through her fictional narrator’s often navel-gazing soul-searching, Levy finely captures a more universal sentiment of helplessness. One that is both characteristic of our oversaturated, hyperconnected era and a condition of being in the present, always looking back, feeling as if the flow of history has somehow congealed and come to a juddering halt in the now.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy. Hamish Hamilton, £18.99 (hardcover)
From the April & May 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
