Gail Scott’s most recent collection, Permanent Revolution: Essays (Book*hug Press), reads backward. It begins in the present, with Scott’s experiments in language taking her to Paris, San Francisco, and, most recently, Obama-era New York. Part two returns to Montreal, where Scott got her start in the ’70s as a writer, journalist, translator, and editor; in these older essays, Scott evokes the polyglot community she built with Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik, and France Théoret, sharing bottles of wine, arguing about Maurice Blanchot until midnight, and reading issues of Tel quel in the back of a Volkswagen van. 

With variations on every way a sentence could be, Permanent Revolution has few constants, though it always makes room for friendship, politics, and language. It could be feminist, it could be queer, but it evades a fixed identity. It’s liquid and subtle. As probing as Gertrude Stein, as lusty as François Rabelais, as analytical as Luce Irigaray, Scott seems forever in motion. Places and ideas fly by, leaving Scott’s readers wondering, like the curious revelers in Édouard Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera: Who is she?