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Lucy Church Amiably
by Gertrude Stein
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (2000-04)
ISBN: 1564782409
EAN: 9781564782403
Dewy Decimal #: 813.52
Paperback: 240 pages
Edition: Dalkey Archive Ed
SKU: S061013-1713-DL
Condition: New
Comments: New Book. New condition. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy,
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In spite of all the recent interest in the writings of Gertrude Stein, the novel LUCY CHURCH AMIABLY has remained one of the least known of her major works. The first edition, pubished in Paris in 1930, was never widely distributed in the United States and the American edition (published in 1969) stayed in print for only a short time. It was written in the summer of 1927, a very special year for avant-garde writing. Many writers composed their most lyrical works in that year--Joyce, for instance, wrote the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of FINNEGAN'S WAKE. The pages of such magazines as "transition," which reflected the taste of the vanguard, and which had just begun to appear in Paris, show this development. Lucey itself is a small village in central France, located over the hill from where Miss Stein was staying, and over another hill from where the distinguished French playwright Paul Claudel was staying, which explains the references to Claudel and to the hills in the text. It seemed lyrical to Miss Stein to name her character Lucy Church for the church at Lucey. This is the source of many of her names and images--they are puns from French to English. Nothing much happends in the book. It would be impossible to prepare an outline of the plot (as opposed, say, to THE MAKING OF AMERICANS). The action is purely interior: a great deal is noticed, digested, absorbed, compared. The result can be read simply as an account of being in the countryside, or more complexly, as an investigation into the interlocking nature of things and into the ways that language can be used for description. LUCY CHURCH AMIABLY is finally, in Miss Stein's own words, "A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving."
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Amazon.com Review
There is no summarizing or explaining the writings of Gertrude Stein. With the exception of her fledgling efforts like Three Lives or her funny, successful memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her fictions are without conventional plot, setting, or character. They are intellectual flowers, each sentence growing or receding from the one before it, repeating its main points with subtle, telling changes. In Lucy Church Amiably, first published in Paris in 1930 and long out of print, Stein describes the landscape and pastoral life of central France (while writing, she was staying near a small village named Lucy) in and through her character Lucy Church: "Gradually remembering a lake. Gradually. Remembering. A lake. In gradually remembering a lake by the shore of the lake where they were sitting." Yet Stein is not opaque or purely musical: she always provides solid details in unexpected places, specializing, as the critic Fred Dupee put it, in "the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense." She is a central figure in the modernist movement, but her relentless pleasure in her quirky, handmade idiom can repel the unwary reader. Although it is a delight to have this reprint, a brief introduction would have been useful for the uninitiated. Those interested in Stein should also turn to her Selected Writings, or, for a painless entrée to her work, begin with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. --Regina Marler
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