ATTEMPTING to review The Montreal Massacre is like trying to judge a howl of pain as a piece of music. The usual criteria just don`t fit. The Montreal Massacre is a collection of essays, letters, and poems - originally published in French as Polytechnique, 6 decembre - written by Quebec feminists in response to the murder of 14 female engineering students at the Universite de Montreal, young women separated by virtue of their gender alone from their male colleagues and shot by a man who, in his suicide note, vowed "to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker." It is not a book, in the traditional sense, so much as a documentary in print. As such it has all the failings - and all the raw power - of the form. One cannot read it and not weep. The bits and pieces of writing, most of them composed in the terror and outrage of the weeks immediately following the massacre, are gathered loosely into five chapters. `No Motive for the Crime` is an angry denunciation of the media coverage of the mass murder. `We don`t understand why" said the commentators. "Misogyny," the women reply, stridently. "There is a price for women`s liberation," writes Francine Pelletier; "it is death" In "Fearful Words" the essays focus on the language of feminism and on censorship. "Very early on, sharp directives fell down ail around us," writes Armande Saintjean, a University of Quebec professor: We were above all not to say that in every male could be found lying dormant a Marc Lepine. We were also not to say that the fourteen women students at the Polytechnique were, in fact, symbols: that they embodied the progress that women have made in the past two or three decades. Why did the victims, at gunpoint, deny they were feminists? What does it mean to call a killer a maniac? And why, in the French media, were the students identified using the male form of the noun and not the female? While the book generally reads very well, and Ragweed/gynergy must be cornmended for bringing it out in English so quickly, this discussion surely suffers in translation. English is sexist in different ways from French, and the English reader could use a guiding hand in understanding how it is that the students were denied their gender after dying because of it. While some of the letters verge on the incoherent - rage is rarely coherent and this, in itself, is no sin - some of the later essays are ultimately more moving because they strike both the heart and the mind. The pieces in "This Is Not the First Time" provide some historical perspective, a theme continued in "Violence Great and Small," where the writers probe the murder not as an isolated act but as the extremity of a vile, twisted continuum. The journalist Gloria Escomel: The public debate which followed demonstrated beyond a doubt that a great many men hate feminists, and not only those who wrote articles, gave interviews, or swamped the open-line shows, but also those who, in ordinary conversations, expressed their contempt for feminists and feminism. The gunman killed fourteen women, but in his wake, thousands of men symbolically killed all feminists. The Montreal Massacre is not balanced reportage. There are only two male voices, and only one from outside the province of Quebec. The same ground is gone over again and again, but there is basically only one kind of shoe kicking up the dirt. Yet to come, I suspect, is the traditional book about the murders: a biographical sketch of Lepine, the lives of the women he killed, the culture that the madman and his victims grew out of. But that is a backward look, and reinforces the individuality of the event. The Montreal Massacre is the bloody aftermath, a ritual, repetitive howl of anguish and anger at man`s inhumanity to woman. This book allows that December 6, like August 6, will forever after be a symbol, albeit of a different kind of war. Writes the feminist activist Nicole Lacelle: All of a sudden, the women say to themselves: if it really was women who were singled out, I could have been one of them. All of a sudden, the men say to themselves: it was a man who fired that gun, and we too are men. It all happened deep in the unconscious, everyone pursuing their own objectives in utter darkness, right up to the fatal collision. Fourteen women dead, and one man. How many wounded?