My Paris (Lannan Selection) - Softcover

Scott, Gail

3.41

104 ratings by Goodreads

9781564782977: My Paris (Lannan Selection)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564782972 ISBN 13: 9781564782977

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003

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In My Paris, a Canadian woman keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio. Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's designer clothing across the boulevard. Or she roams the streets, caught between nostalgia and a competing sense of the present day, between Paris's rich cultural traditions and the realities of Western imperialism. Disillusioned by her inability to reconcile these contradictions and by her own part in perpetuating them, she assembles in her journal pieces of the present, past, of art, philosophy, of herself, and of the world outside her.

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About the Author:

Gail Scott is a writer and translator. She has been short-listed twice for the QSPELL (Qu�bec English-language fiction) award. A former journalist who has worked for Canada's leading newspapers, she is also a founding editor of the Montr�al French-language cultural journal Spirale, and the bilingual journal of women's writing, Tessera. Her translations include France Th�oret'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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