In Gertrude Stein's Surrealist Years, Ery Shin crafts a fascinating account of Stein's engagement with the surrealist movement. The first element of this study is a detailed history of Stein's personal and artistic connections to the major figures of the surrealist movement, including (but not limited to) Guillaume Appollinaire, Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and René Crevel. The second element is a consideration of Stein's late war writings as she lived through the occupation of France and responded in her literary work as the world changed relentlessly around her. At the outset Shin makes the fusion of these two elements explicit, since it is “impossible to speak of surrealism without speaking of war, the most concretely realized macrocosm for nihilistic bodily excesses prohibited (and largely unimaginable) in broad daylight” (4). To this end Shin focusses her study on Stein's late writings and considers them through the lens of the surrealism of war itself.

In contemporary Stein studies it is nearly impossible to sidestep debates surrounding Stein's complicities during the troublesome war years and Shin sets the scene by artfully dismantling the arguments of both Janet Malcolm and Barbara Will in particular. In contrast to Malcolm and Will's hyperbolic depictions of Stein's collaborationist tendencies, Shin paints a picture of Stein's compromised war years: of days filled with boredom and fear, of seven-mile jaunts to find food, of partial information wrested from newscasts, of disquiet pervading the everyday. Living through the occupation of France is by its nature an exercise in compromise, and Shin makes the case clearly: “If Stein is deemed a collaborationist, then virtually anyone in France at the time could be as well” (3). In the academic debate that condemns Stein there seems a surprising lack of sympathy for a time of compromise, of conflicting allegiances, and of the very real danger of living in Vichy France as an American Jew. Shin goes further, noting, “None of Stein's critics seem to have read her later works and biographies in detail, if at all” (75), a claim I would strongly endorse.

To redress this balance Shin's study focusses in detail on a series of Stein's writings from the 1940s, with a particular focus on Ida, Wars I Have Seen, and Mrs Reynolds, and her case is bolstered by a sympathetic return to the literary work itself. Shin's detailed and nuanced discussions of the influence of surrealism on Stein's artistic production in this period are both compelling and convincing. In response to this moment Stein begins to shape narratives that are filled with hallucinatory visions, teleportation, extreme coincidences, action reversals, doppelgangers, dream sequences spanning both sleeping and waking states, and great whiffs of the occult. As Shin notes, “In the 1940s Stein repeatedly expounds upon the dreamlike atmosphere pervading her everyday life” (103). The war effaced time; weeks no longer existed and Stein and Toklas existed in a vastly extended present in which their waking world became stranger and more dreamlike. Coupled with this the scarcity of food forced them to conserve energy and retire to bed earlier each night. They slept more and more and this abundance of dreams slipped softly into their waking hours.

An atmosphere of strangeness pervades the work from this period and in a quote from Wars I Have Seen Stein corroborates this movement away from realism: “There is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter” (103). This movement towards the surreal finds fruition in these texts and Stein sketches visions of soldiers appearing as phantoms on the horizon and envisions the youthful German army as a troop of childlike automatons, as mass-produced mindless killers. The world becomes both theatrical and uncanny and this moment of conflicting allegiance finds expression in astounding identity shifts: “Such uncanny sentiments intensify during war's almost outlandishly cinematic costume changes. The way resistance members and enemy spies burn through alternate identities both unnerves and amuses Stein in Wars I Have Seen” (125). Ultimately, in this comprehensive and wonderfully written book, Ery Shin makes a strong case that surrealism's poetics of opposition are the perfect form for Stein to express this historical moment of conflicting perspectives and fantastic juxtapositions.