Kate Evans
speaker
26,301 appearances
191 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2018
last heard 4d ago
Kate Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
born in Copenhagen, has an absent Canadian husband who she talks to by Facebook once a week but hasn't seen for a year.
And then Fanny is polyamorous and has three women lovers.
And so it's partly a story about a friendship.
But in fact, that friendship component and what this woman is doing as she moves forward
around Paris does research, goes to cemeteries, you know, meets a man who it turns out is much more interested in her beautiful friend Eva with her beautiful blue eyes that whenever anybody sees her eyes they go, oh.
And that's another little joke throughout the book.
80 or 90% of this book is actually about the modernist writer, Gertrude Stein, because the narrator of the book is trying and failing to write an essay about Gertrude Stein.
Now, I have spent years failing to read the work of Gertrude Stein, even though she is one of those modernist writers with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, who you see references to because she knew everybody.
She...
talked about herself all the time.
The good thing about this book is that it explains all that.
It doesn't presume that you know who Gertrude Stein is, why she matters.
She stops and tells you and gives you stories and fragments and moments from Gertrude Stein's life that are really nicely done.
And that, I understand, reflect the writing style of Stein.
So they're pen portraits and little moments.
But I can see some people are going to say, I'm not sure that I want to read a book about Gertrude Stein.
And I have a feeling, Bernadette, you might be one of those.
She does play around with the fact that Gertrude Stein called herself a genius and she makes little jokes about that, about what it means, particularly for a woman born in the 1870s, you know, wealthy American family,
who then finds herself in Europe, to actually claim the space to be a genius.
When I gather in her family, everybody believed her brother was the genius.
Showing 3421–3440 of 26,301 · page 172 of 1316
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