Gertrude Stein's "Paris France"

I had read somewhere that Gertrude Stein's writing was difficult, but that's not the case here. Yes, she wrote run-on sentences that were short on punctuation, but the sentences are not hard to understand, except for the occasional one that can be read in more than one way because of poor grammar.

As I read "Paris France," I wondered about the style. Was it meant to be stream of consciousness, naive, childlike, like speech, or all of these? To me, the effect of the style was to make Gertrude Stein appear a simpleton.

"Foreigners belong in France because they have always been there and did what they had to do there and remained foreigners there. Foreigners should be foreigners and it is nice that foreigners are foreigners and that they inevitably are in Paris and in France."

I decided to check my reactions to the Stein style against others, and so Googled the book and read the Wikipedia entry, which describes "Paris France" as a novella. Now, I had considered it a memoir, and still do (the back cover of the paperback unhelpfully calls it "literature"). But it's funny that changing the genre from memoir to fiction can change one's opinion of the very same prose one was reading before the change in perception. As a novella, the writing in "Paris France" is more acceptable, if you consider that you have an unreliable narrator who is a little dim.

Gertrude Stein lived in France through both World Wars, but her treatment of them in this book seems to show her desire to distance herself from the wars as much as possible. Perhaps if you're in the middle of a war, it's natural to lie low and hope you live through it.

I confess that "Paris France" has caused me to think a lot, even if my first thoughts were about how little I liked it.