Last Words from Montmartre

Last Words from Montmartre

Miaojin Qiu, 1969-

Book - 2014

"An NYRB Classics Original Last Words from Montmartre is a novel in letters that narrates the gradual dissolution of a relationship between two lovers and, ultimately, the complete unraveling of the narrator. In a voice that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to hubris, compulsive repetition to sublime reflection, reticence to vulnerability, it can be read as both the author's masterpiece and a labor of love, as well as her own suicide note. Last Words from Montmartre, written just as Internet culture was about to explode, is also a kind of farewell to letters. The opening note urges us to read the letters in any order. Each letter unfolds as a chapter, the narrator writing from Paris to her lover in Taipei a...nd to family and friends in Taiwan and Tokyo. The book opens with the death of a beloved pet rabbit and closes with a portentous expression of the narrator's resolve to kill herself. In between we follow Qiu's protagonist into the streets of Montmartre; into descriptions of affairs with both men and women, French and Taiwanese; into rhapsodic musings on the works of Theodoros Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky; and into wrenching and clear-eyed outlines of what it means to exist not only between cultures but, to a certain extent, between and among genders. More Confessions of a Mask than Well of Loneliness, the novel marks Qiu as one of the finest experimentalist and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation"--

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FICTION/Qiu Miaojin
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Subjects
Lesbian authors > Fiction.
Psychological fiction.
Epistolary fiction.
Romance fiction.
Biographical fiction.
Genres
Epistolary fiction
Romance fiction
Biographical fiction
Published
New York : New York Review Books 2014.
Language
English
Chinese
Main Author
Miaojin Qiu, 1969- (-)
Other Authors
Ari Larissa Heinrich (translator), Qiu Miaojin, 1969-1995 (-)
Physical Description
161 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781590177259
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The reception of this short novel, which is considered a high point in Taiwanese LGBT fiction, will unavoidably be colored by Qiu's suicide in 1995, at age 26 (the book was written just before her death and posthumously published in Taiwanese). Her memorable dedication reads, "For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead." As Heinrich, the translator, explains in the afterword, the book's spiraling, plotless structure mirrors Qiu's increasingly intense last days. Written in the form of letters, the novel vacillates between romantic ecstasy and despair, while a coherent story slowly emerges. As the unnamed narrator pursues graduate studies in France, she grows increasingly alienated from her lovers and family still living in Taiwan. She feels adrift and alone without the love of her life, Xu, and without Bunny, the pet rabbit they cared for together, and she seeks relief from her overwhelming pain: "I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die." Qiu's voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants even as she writes from the familiar perspective of a spurned lover. It would be wrong to interpret the book's-or, for that matter, the author's-ultimate surrender to death as a rejection of the richness of life; rather, like Goethe's young Werther, this "last testament" (an alternative translation of the title) affirms the power of literature. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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