BREWSIE & WILLIE

by STEIN (Gertrude).

Gertrude Stein’s 1946 novella Brewsie and Willie explores and articulates the anxieties of a group of young American soldiers and nurses caught in the limbo between the end of the World War II and their return home to civilian life.

Genres: Fiction, Literature

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

Reviews

[melita · Rating 4 out of 5]

much like Lady Gaga and Cher, there will never be something by Gertrude Stein that I won't love. But I especially love...

..."but you have to really learn to express complication, go easy and if you can't go easy go as easy as you can."

and also much like Lady Gaga and Cher, the writing styles of Gertrude Stein aren't for everyone.

[Dumptruck Usa · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of all time. Just slide into this short novel and let the characters' jibing and jabbering take over.

[Valentina Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brewsie and Willie is more straightforward than some of Stein's work, but it's unlike the other World War texts of hers that I'm most familiar with. If you like Wars I Have Seen, then you'll find this shorter novel to be more enjoyable because it is structured as philosophical and casual conversations among the soldiers stationed abroad in World War II. The writing is more spirited and less verbose than WIHS because it mimics (mimesis) speech patterns of the time instead of recounting minute details about war.

[Emily Rosenbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stein nails so much of human discourse and has incredible sentences that just resonate with truth. It's just hard to accept that a Jewish lesbian at this time would think that the mundane, everyday topics she focuses on are the most important things she could be addressing in her work. But that's Stein for you.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gertrude Stein's novella of conversations among U.S. G.I.s in Europe after WWII is a timeless critique of the American persona. On industrialism: "You make it sound like chewing gum. You chew and chew but it don't feed you." On knowledge: "I don't see why I got to believe a thing only because it's true." On apathy: "...well the way you said we hadnt guts enough to make ourselves heard, it does make me cry." An aside on language proves prescient in light of the recent literary assault from A.I.: "...how can you think when you got to articulate alike." She even addresses white supremacy: "Yeah...that's easy, be the strong white man, who can never be brought down, that's all right if you had never left home, but you have left home, you're scared, you're thinking about everything and way back deep down you're scared, scared." Throughout this curious book, Stein is taking on topics that define what it means to be a white American man, how our populace's identification with mass-production jobs robs us of individuality, how states rights is a bunch of hooey, and how we want someone outside us to provide us with solutions for problems that are too big for any single individual to solve.

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you know, said Pauline with great solemnity, you know that Stein woman who says things. Yeah we all know, said Willie. Well she said America that is the United States of America is the oldest country in the world because she went into the twentieth century in eighteen ninety, when all the others were way behind and so now the United States of America instead of being young and vigorous is old like a man of fifty, still a chippy chaser cause he feels so young, but conservative, just like we are.
- pg. 50-51

[steve]

transcript of an esteemed modernist poet playing with her GI joes