I was not expecting Gertrude Stein's short story "
the Gentle Lena" to be so... odd. And it's odd for a bunch of ways. There's her penchant for adjectives, and in particular "german" as a descriptor, which I was never sure how to interpret, what I was suppose to denote. There was the constant repetition. There was the cynicism.
I found it all, to be honest, relentlessly and almost unbearably stifling. I suppose this may have been how the titular Lena was supposed to feel?
It's not entirely uninteresting and I suppose it captured well the pressure and insistence on marriage as a cultural norm back in the day. But holy hell, it was a slog.
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