A lighthearted, free-associative novel about female friendship and literary inspiration ... If the combination of Levy’s light tone and the bookish details on Stein doesn’t always come together, all the parts of this novel are delightful in themselves: funny, wide-ranging, and worthy of their comma-challenged muse.

The book is far from biographical, or far from biographical in the traditional sense ... As ever, Levy’s writing is subtle and wry ... Language, with all its playfulness, risk, and tender beauty, is the very essence of My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein ... Levy uses language to dismantle and reimagine, to make the familiar seem novel and shiny. It’s no wonder that Stein’s appeal endures. There is always a need for new words and new worlds.

Uncategorisable ... Levy is not competing with Stein’s many biographers. She is writing a meditation, not a chronicle or an explanation ... Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong.

Not simply a portrait of time spent with Stein in a lonely garret. Levy has a gift for populating her work with characters both fictional and historical; her autofiction buzzes with these voices ... Levy, like Stein, is ambiguous. Like Stein, she plays with language and her sentences dazzle – yet their intent is much clearer. She both inhabits and challenges her subject.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/e2e78d64-f7f2-4191-b271-99cf06eb43d8 Levy’s characters are left-leaning, but the political events of their time do not penetrate their everyday experiences directly. Instead, they make for an atmosphere that is muggy with tension, perhaps because the true effects of the current shocks are yet to be revealed ... Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/e2e78d64-f7f2-4191-b271-99cf06eb43d8 Levy has written more substantial novels, with greater character development and more suspense, but this one is designed to leave space for the reader to contemplate the narrator’s experiences and ideas about Stein, put together its elements for themselves and decide what it is all about. It is propelled by the lithe energy of Levy’s prose, but it rewards slowing down.

The straitjackets of fixed literary genre have always eluded Levy, yet My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein proves particularly sly at slipping between categories. Though it volleys between erudite passages describing Stein’s career and life and the architecture of her sentences, it is not a work of biography nor a conventional work of criticism ... It is closer to the French understanding of the term 'novel', where a literary roman can hold anything and everything germane to a writer’s interests ... Musing on charisma, aura and literary celebrity, it also asks what happens when we drift off-script and 'disobey' our idols. Like the lost cat in its opening pages, it slinks out of grasp and does not ask anything as obvious as to be found.

The search for the missing pet is a quirky conduit for Levy’s own version of experimental prose. This work is at heart a tribute to Gertrude Stein, an artist ahead of her time and purposefully, provocatively misunderstood.

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.

What Levy does best is ambiguity, and balancing soulfulness with bathos ... Luckily the glib lines are few enough to be overlooked. What prevails instead is a brilliant sketch of what Stein termed a ‘lost generation’ and, most of all, an intelligent meditation on the peculiarly modern impossibility of truly knowing one another – or ourselves – and the imperative to keep trying.

Inventive ... A beguiling genre-splicer, strewn with questions and some answers.

Arch ... Levy’s attempt to draw a connection between Stein’s milieu and the narrator’s friendships feels a little forced, but the novel comes alive in the narrator’s riveting efforts to grapple with Stein’s idiosyncratic life and work. There’s much to admire.