Two Lives Gertrude and Alice Janet Malcolm

'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."Two Lives" is also a work of literary criticism. 'Even the most hermetic of Stein's writings are works of submerged autobiography', Malcolm writes. 'The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning - you need a crowbar for that - but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion'. Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein 'solves the koan of autobiography', or wrestling with "The Making of Americans", a masterwork of 'magisterial disorder', Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

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"'Janet Malcolm deftly captures Alice B. Toklas's legendary 40-year partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein.' Vogue (Books people are talking about) 'Malcolm's research into those murky wartime and post-war events reads like a great detective story... This short, cogently argued, wholly original book will irrevocably alter history's view of Stein and Toklas' Tom Rosenthal, The Daily Mail 'Malcolm's account of US Stein-criticism is fascinating. By framing her version of Stein's life within the story of how she reached it, she humanises her subject and, in conveying the origin of her own fascination, she increases ours. What she never does is simply give in and write anything approaching straight-forward biography.' Matthew Dennison, The Times 'Janet Malcolm also has the gift of keeping her readers glued to the page, and she peppers a fascinating story with her insights into biographical form.' Frances Wilson, Sunday Telegraph 'Almost everything Malcolm writes, though, germinates in the reader's mind.' Jeremy Treglown, The Spectator 'Even as Malcolm reports - drolly - on the intrigue-filled world of Stein-Toklas scholarship, she also provides a canny assessment of Stein's personality and achievement, the relationship with Toklas, and a telling if melancholy parable of the biographer's art.' Terry Castle, London Review of Books"