My Paris: A Novel - Softcover

Scott, Gail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155128068X ISBN 13: 9781551280684

Publisher: Mercury Pr, 1999

Synopsis

In contemporary Paris, a diarist persistently gathers the remains of an epoch, accompanied by the literary ghost of Walter Benjamin, whose famous Paris arcades project serves as a kind of Baedeker. But, little by little, she becomes an amalgam of her detritus? including a touch of ressentiment. For alongside the pleasureable Paris in which expatriate avant-garde artists and rebels have "traditionally" flourished, lies a typically complex city, teeming with disaster. Casting light and shadow, looking backwards and forwards, My Paris is a hynotizing tale of desire and nostalgia, magically submerging the reader in the endless? and not always seamless? sensuality of the City of Light.

About this title

About the Author:

Gail Scott is the author of the novels Main Brides (Toronto: Coach House, 1993), Heroine (Coach House, 1987; Talon, 1997), and My Paris (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1999), a collection of short stories, Spare Parts (Coach House, 1982), the essay collection Spaces like Stairs (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1989), and la théorie, un dimanche (co-authored with Nicole Brossard et al., remue-ménage, 1988). She has been short-listed twice for the QSPELL (Québec English-language fiction) award. A former journalist who has worked for Canada’s leading newspapers, she is also a founding editor of the Montréal French-language cultural journal Spirale, and the bilingual journal of women’s writing, Tessera. Her translations include France Théoret’s Laurence, and The Sailor’s Disquiet, and Helen with a Secret, both by Michael Delisle.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Scott is French Canadian, and this novel was named one of the 10 best Canadian novels of 1999 by the prestigious Canadian magazine Quill & Quire. That it garnered such kudos will not surprise American readers, for anyone who appreciates serious literature will recognize it is a tour de force of technique, style, and soul. Ostensibly, the novel is the journal of a Canadian writer in temporary residence in a Paris atelier. It is as if readers have been handed the writer's journal, through which they learn her every on-the-spot reaction to being a foreigner--albeit a French-speaking foreigner--in one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. But even given Paris' cosmopolitan nature, is the narrator immediately at home there? Not at all. The city's notorious haughtiness, however, is not to be entirely blamed for the narrator's slow-to-erode sense of "outsiderliness." Much of it has to do with her inability, at first, to respond openly to the multilevel stimulation Paris exerts on anyone who stops there for longer than the usual tourist week or two. Postcard Paris, bourgeois Paris, and even scruffy Paris all comprise the knock-you-sideways set of impressions the successful longtime visitor must absorb. This is a novel of place, of urban place; a novel that is so about Paris that, as cliched as it sounds, Paris functions as the chief protagonist. There are few complete sentences here, yet the reader soon feels at ease with the rhythm and syncopation of a writing style done in words and phrases. Brad Hooper
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About this edition

• Publisher: Mercury Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 155128068X
• ISBN 13: 9781551280684
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165