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Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 480, $33.00

In Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank, a man of wide literary learning who is the editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of the distinguished N.Y.R.B. Of the thirty-two novelists whom Edwin Frank writes about in Stranger Than Fiction, three—the Austrian Alfred Kubin, the Japanese Natsume Sōseki, and the German Hans Erich Nossack—were previously unknown to me. Frank gives Gertrude Stein an entire chapter, which he calls “The American Sentence.” In it, he claims that through her style “she also helped to transform not only the American novel but the twentieth-century novel.” He concentrates on her language, writing, “Overcoming the sense of uncertainty and inadequacy and isolation that had marked her childhood and her intellectual and sexual coming of age, she fashioned an instrument that allowed her to air and explore her most characteristic and intimate concerns—her sexuality, her femininity, her philosophical turn of mind, her love of words and wordplay at once childish and sophisticated—in entire freedom and in depth.” All this may very well be true, but none of it makes Stein very readable.

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