My Paris

By Gail Scott

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564782972
• ISBN13: 9781564782977
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.4"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Beyond plot

My Paris is the scantest trace of a plotline. Its nothing you are going to lose yourself in, but a book - like Woolf's Orlando - that forces you to pause, consider, and backpedal after each passage. Conceptually, the book begins with the syntax where the present-progressive verb tense complicates time while blurring the distinction between subject and predicate. All in all, the book describes Paris and all that influences a character's impression of it.

By an original and deftly talented novelist

My Paris by Gail Scott is a work of literary fiction about a Canadian woman's time in a Parisian studio. Examining cultural legacy entrenched against the onslaught of globalized mass-media, and written in a staccato style that relies upon long strings of sentence fragments - complete subject-verb sentences are disdained for the power of emotional abbreviations of thought and form - My Paris is memorable and distinguished work, marking Gail Scott as an original and deftly talented novelist.