SAY IT AGAIN

Gertrude Stein's cryptic connections.

- BY JUDITH THURMAN

When I was six, my maiden aunt Eva gave me a first edition of "The World Is Round," by Gertrude Stein. Eva, who worked in a used bookstore, was the only bohemian in our family, and she revered Stein. I had never seen a book with pink pages and blue type, so I guessed that all first editions must be pink and blue. "I think you can read this yourself," Eva said. "It's long, but the words are simple."

"The World Is Round" was marketed as a children's book, which leads me to suspect that few adults, apart from Stein scholars and biographers, have ever read it through. It's the terrifying story of a girl named Rose who loves the color blue and doesn't know who she is. One of the things that most troubled me about Rose was an obscure anxiety that we shared: "Why am I a little girl[.]" I didn't notice at the time that Stein makes her own rules about periods, or that Rose is fixated on round shapes, and since girls have a round cavity between their thighs—a place we weren't supposed to touch—and boys have something else (the boy in the story, whose name is Willie, knows who he is), you can make of all this pink and blue what you will.

On the third page, Rose cruelly punishes a little dog named Pépé, who isn’t hers, though she pretends he is. (See above.) Pépé “had been taught never to do in a room what should be done outside,” but, after he disobeys an order, Rose shuts him in a room where he is “so nervous being left all alone” that he does it. When he finally gets out, ashamed and traumatized, he bites her. I was terrified of dogs from then on.