Heroine

By Gail Scott

Book Overview

It is October, 1980, the 10th anniversary of the October Crisis. In a bathtub in a rooming house near the city's heart, Montreal's "Main", a woman is trying to negotiate her personal passage from Quebec's politically turbulent 70s to the threatening bleakness of the 80s. She is negotiating other passages, too: from a passionate "open" love affair with a male left leader, and from deep involvement in far left politics, to a new way of life and living whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889224153
• ISBN13: 9780889224155
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

remembrance of things past read...

I read this book eleven years ago in Brisbane. The girl I fell in love with had a friend who'd lived in Canada and been given it. I was blown away by the concentric plot, the language and the flawed dignity and the weary beauty of the narrator's tale. I'd love to read this book again 'cause I was nineteen back then. I don't have a credit card so I'll just keep grazing in old bookshops with the faith in them funny ordinary little miracles. This book is one of the, say, two dozen novels that have truly added magic to my sweet short life and have given me that extatic gratitude [that sweet, sweet feel] for art and life. I reckon you should read it...

Heroine is Wonderful

The obscure, tortured and lovely Heroine was given to me by a good friend who, while going to Concordia University in Montreal, was fortunate to get to know one the few small circles of readers who worship this book. It is a stunning novel. Our narrator, the Heroine, lays in her bathtub, trying to focus on the "small spot" beneath the trickle of water, waiting for release. As she lays there, memories of love and politics in 1970's Montreal surface and submerge in complex, dreamlike layers of narrative. The novel seems timeless as Scott masterfully captures the reader in the moment of a psyche - with all its memories, conflicts and scars. Against the backround of politically volotile Quebec, the heroine cannot find a balance between her leftist ideology and her need for romantic love. Never sentimental or indulgent, Heroine is a tense, powerful read.