last words from montmartre by qiu miaojin

It feels inadequate to offer a critical interpretation of this work without first addressing its fraught context.

Last Words is an undeniable force, a fully immersive experience unrestrained in its experimentations in form and its fearless explorations of the intimate, violent, ecstatic and all-consuming aspects of love and art. Through twenty letters addressed to former lovers, friends and herself, set against the backdrops of Paris, Tokyo and Taipei, the reader is taken through a series of reflections that are unwieldy, at times rueful in their rebellion against structure and linear time, but which nevertheless offer exacting and controlled analysis. Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre contains the main narrator Zoë's final meditations on her relationship and eventual breakup with her former lover, Xu, before her planned suicide. Qiu Miaojin (author), Ari Larissa Heinrich (translator), Last Words from Montmartre, New York Review of Books Classics, 2014. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre: A Celebration of Life and Death Through Art They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders-until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed.

The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women-their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love.

An NYRB Classics Original When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre.

Last words from montmartre by qiu miaojin