Heroine (1987)

I met Gail Scott in the very late 1990s. She was in town doing something at UBC,  I think, which meant no one knew about it who wasn't attached to the institution. Or maybe it wasn't UBC; maybe it was a smaller bookstore when we had more of those. I said UBC because she was staying at Richard Cavell and Peter Dickinson's place, and I assumed because Richard was at UBC he was somehow involved in her being here. The book she was touring with was My Paris (1999).

Gail's best known book is Heroine (1987), and I tried for years to read it. Now, nowhere near any meaningful anniversary of its publication (33.3 years?), it occurred to me that the book's own sense of anniversary (the Montreal narrator reflecting on ten years since Canada's 1970 "October Crisis") might occasion a ninth try. Heroine is set ten years after the events that led up to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's 1970 declaration of the War Measures Act and begins, for the most part, in a Montreal bathtub. Not the bright wildly coloured Bonnardian bath tubs that make us think of spring, but a rooming house tub on a grey autumn day.

And I'm loving it! Just as Erin Mouré did, who noted its "density and beauty" on the book's back cover. Renata Adler writes similarly, but without the beauty. It's a hard thing to do -- density and beauty -- just as it's a hard thing to become the kind of reader who appreciates these qualities, together. I am a way better reader than I was when I first met Gail. 

Some lines I underlined:

Oh dream only a woman's mouth could do it as well as you. (9)

Even a WASP, if politicized, can recognize a colonizer. (13)

People were freer then. (13)

Refusing to explain how I'm using the place for an experiment of living in the present. (14)

Maintenant tu vas prendre un bon verre. (15)

In a lighted square, a white-clothed man with a thin dog leaned back playing his flute to lions of stone. (17)

The feminist nemesis was, the more I felt your love the harder it was to breathe. (19)

Heroine can be ordered directly from the publisher. Here's some writing on the book from Eileen Myles, who wrote the foreword to the latest edition.