The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

For years, friends met resistance when they encouraged Stein (1874--1946) to write about the vibrant community of artists, writers, dancers, musicians she hosted, salon-style, in her Paris home in the early 20th century. That Stein's close friendships with Matisse, Picasso, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and numerous others coincided with her life with her longtime companion Alice B. Toklas proved especially opportune when she did take pen to paper. Stein's experimental "autobiography" of Toklas, first published in 1933, has since become a classic, providing insight into the work, personalities, and domestic arrangements of their friends and acquaintances. Here, Kalman's signature artwork, color-drenched and featuring heavy black line, is as individual as Stein's writing. The artist illuminates delightful and quirky phrases ("I like a view, but I like to sit with my back to it"; "who, I asked Fernande are all these little men"), and most of the illustrations are portraits (Stein herself wrote a number of portraits of friends), while a few reference iconic photos of Stein or Toklas. In a moving endnote, Kalman expresses reluctance to leave the two, acknowledging Toklas's role in the partnership, asking, "Who holds the pen? Who has the ideas?" VERDICT Toss out your old editions, this is the one you'll want to own.--Daryl Grabarek, PS 89/IS 289, NY

Whimsical illustrations meet quirky prose in this tag-team reinvention of the iconic 1933 book.An award-winning New Yorker illustrator, designer, and author, Kalman (Swami on Rye: Max in India, 2018, etc.) takes on the challenge of illustrating Stein's iconic "auto" biography of her longtime companion Toklas. Even though it's not as ambitious as Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (2006) or Matt Kish's Moby-Dick in Pictures (2011), Kalman's 70-plus color illustrations, rendered in her distinctive playful and Fauve-esque style, perfectly reflect the artistic and intellectual world of Paris in the 1920s and '30s. In a short afterword, written in Kalman's distinctive script, she describes the book as a "love story" about how "two people, joined together, become themselves. They cannot breathe right without each other." An accompanying illustration shows them sitting together at a table, Stein reading a book (aloud?), Toklas looking on (listening?). On the final page of the book, Stein notes that Toklas probably will not write her autobiography, so "I am going to write it for you.And she did and this is it." On first meeting Stein, Toklas said there are a "great many things to tell of what was happening then.I must describe what I saw when I came." With the current volume, we see what Kalman saw. Here's Stein sitting in a bright yellow chair at her popular Paris home at 27 rue de Fleurus, Picasso's famous portrait of Stein on the wall behind her. Luminaries came and went, all beautifully captured with Kalman's bright brush strokes: Toulouse-Lautrec; Seurat, who "caught his fatal cold"; the "extraordinarily brilliant" Guillaume Apollinaire; William James, Stein's former teacher; Marcel Duchamp ("everybody loved him)"; Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky; James Joyce and Sylvia Beach; Hemingway; the "beautiful" Edith Sitwell; and of course, Toklas, wearing one of her hats with "lovely artificial flowers" on top.A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.