Paris France (novel)

[1][2] The book blends Stein's childhood memories with a commentary on French people and culture.

It is interpreted as Gertrude Stein’s personal view of France as a country, and the French people.

Throughout the novel, the idea of being French in France is communicated to the reader in a raw, confident, matter of fact way.

Among her meditations on French character and “civilisation,” Gertrude Stein’s Paris France (1940) includes a quick dismissal of the “sur-realist crowd”: That was really the trouble with the sur-realist crowd, they missed their moment of becoming civilized, they used their revolt, not as a private but as a public thing, they wanted publicity not civilisation, and so really they never succeeded in being peaceful and exciting.

But Stein employs two literary styles in order to make this claim and stay within the sur-realist crowd.

She begins the novel with her earliest memories of Paris and anything French she experienced throughout her childhood in San Francisco.

It is clear that the war had a great impact on her life, but with only a year in between the invasion of Poland and publishing of the book there is no real way to determine what parts of it she is referring to.