The Obituary is a kind of ghost story viewed from the top floor Montréal triplex window by a "Face" forever “trying to get into the narrative” as a friend puts it. The ghosts include a tap-dancing grandfather and the early 20th Paris gendarme who has a crush on him, several “halfbreed” ancestors, notably Rosie’s late mother, “Veeeera” (that picture on page 137 is a photo of my late mother). And—given the triplex is built over Montréal’s 19-century burnt-down Crystal Palace—also ghosts of people who walked and fought and died during the 1885 smallpox epidemic for which the Palace became a hospice. 

I don’t like talking about the past unless I can as Walter Benjamin said “telescope (it) in the present”--the impossible present,  with its ghosts: ghosts of other languages whispering behind the one(s) we speak; the ghosts of lovers, of lost people and geographies, the ghosts of voices just heard, on the street, on the radio, also, the ghosts of unforgettable pleasures. This novel is kind of about the ongoing question of who-am-...we (for with all those voices coming in—“one” is never really alone). And how to capture that in words. Like some painters—I feel every novel offers new narrative and syntactical challenges regarding its intersection with the moment of time in which it is written. And that challenge is met in the crafting of sentences to meet time's ever changing requirements and in the creation of relationships between them.

My favourite quote so far about The Obituary is:

No one is pushing the sentence farther than Scott is. No one has as much going on: each sentence is like a long, strand of DNA pirouetting in the palm of her hand.
(Lemon Hound)

You can read about my other books here.

I have lived in many places, including New York, Paris, Grenoble, and Stockholm. But my main port is Montréal, a city so sonorously distinct with its mix of languages that I have been obsessed with the music in prose--and in sentences as elements of composition--almost since I began writing. I hope this is palpable in all my Montréal novels, especially in my newest, The Obituary. Other novels include My Paris, about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in 1990s Paris. For a complete list novels, stories and essays see Books. The anthology Biting The Error, edited with Bob Gluck, Camille Roy, and Mary Berger, was shortlisted for a Lambda award. My translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award in translation (2001). I am co-founder of the critical French-language journal Spirale (Montréal), Tessera, and Narrativity. My work generally does not respect the boundaries of language and genre, though courageous translators have rendered it into French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.