A century ago, the writer Gertrude Stein got a haircut. The big, loose bun we see in Picasso’s 1906 portrait was scissored to the floor by Stein’s partner, Alice B Toklas, resulting in a distinctly uncompromising look, suggestive of a poolside Mafia don or a cruel Roman emperor. Something had been lost (Ernest Hemingway wrote of Stein’s ‘lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair’); but something else, a potent emblem of both Stein’s fierce modernity and the couple’s playfully subversive adoption of conventional domestic mores, had been disclosed in its place. (‘I talk to the wives,’ Toklas said of their legendary salons. She famously did the cooking, too, not to mention the typing.)

Losing and finding both figure prominently in Deborah Levy’s new ‘fiction’. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein follows an unnamed narrator of about Levy’s age who shares the author’s documented passion for swimming and is having a hard time writing an ‘essay’ on Stein, while navigating life in the Ville des Lumières with two friends, Eva and Fanny, and, later on, the enigmatic Jean-Luc. Sometimes, losing something means being rid of an encumbrance – in the case of Stein and Toklas, the indignities of the patriarchy and the miseries of a heterosexual future. Sometimes, it’s more painful, as in the case of Eva’s beloved cat, Bob, previously known as ‘it’, whose departure is announced in the book’s first sentence.

The narrator’s frustrations with Stein stem at least partly from the difficulty of her writing: ‘Stein had put so much in my way … Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops.’ Stein aspired to do something with prose that was