Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books Classics)

Definitely an interesting book. The notes on the back are quite accurate and will give you a good sense if this is something that you would be interested in. My short visceral response to this book is: "Was it insane because it was so intense or was it intense because it was so insane". Please don't take "insane" literally.

Bought as a required text for a class, content isn't important for the review, but my prof did help translate the writing. Arrived in excellent quality.

This is a surprising novel. I felt like talking with the writer. It has influence from Cortazar / carta a una señorita en París/ and her writing style kept me interested at all times.Why is this novel in the shadows while Niebla is well known in Latin America?I will look for her other writings!

A brilliant and sad work of fiction that really turned out to be your basic, passive aggressive suicide letter. I hated reading this as I felt like I was encouraging the author's suicide as it was so very apparent that she was in so much pain, but as document in regard to psychology, queer representation and or literature I loved some of it but still felt this great guilt in reading this book.

Great book (or horrible book) for the lesbianic love sick. Also make sure to read the afterward.

-- "Oh... if one were to call this book an unintelligible collection of hieroglyphics with no words and a plot that had long since disappeared, one would be right."Imagine you are in a booth of a restaurant, or perhaps on a train. From behind, you hear a woman talking. Either her companion does not reply, or you don't catch what is said. It is not always easy to understand the main speaker either; there is a lot of talk about love, perhaps love between women, though different partners are mentioned. As most of the proper names are Chinese, you are not sure of the genders. But the speaker is clearly in distress; there are even hints of suicide. Should you intervene? But then the tone changes. You are no longer sure that the speaker is a woman after all. The setting of what s/he is describing is no longer Paris, but Tokyo, or is it Taipei? Several of the same names crop up again. Gradually you guess at a story: a passionate affair, betrayals, separation, reunion, determination, pain.-- "If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written."I admit to buying this solely on account of this unusual challenge (and because I trust NYRB books). There are twenty "letters" in this epistolary novella, although not all of them are in letter form. The book keeps them in more or less numerical order, although Letter Five comes just before Letter Eleven and there is an additional Letter Seventeen, coming after Letter Ten. I used the randomizing function on my computer, and printed out the resultant order to use as a bookmark: 19, 5, 1, 8, and so on. The result was like no other reading experience I have ever had: reading as a matter of immersion rather than following a thread, getting to know the narrator from the inside before I had the slightest idea of her biographical facts. If it does not sound sexist to say so, I would call it a profoundly feminine way of reading, rather than my normal let's-get-on-with-it masculine one.-- "For dead little Bunny / and / Myself, soon dead." Qiu's dedication.Weeks after completing this manuscript, the author, twenty-six-year-old Qiu Miaojin kills herself. Among other things, this novella is her suicide note, turning her death into an artistic statement rather than an act of despair. Already celebrated as a writer in her native Taiwan (especially among feminist and lesbian circles), she has gone to Paris to join the women's studies program run by novelist Hélène Cixous; the book is laced with references to other feminist writers such as Marguerite Yourcenar and Clarice Lispector. And this being Paris, she embraces cinema as high art, following especially the films of Theodoros Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky. But her main dealings are the interpersonal ones, and most of her writing is about love: love lost, love turned to despair, love persisting against all odds, and just occasionally love at the height of sexual passion. I can't say I enjoyed these passages of self-analysis, which can get quite turgid; I don't know whether to put this down to the translator, Ari Larissa Heinrich, or to the author's own confessional earnestness. All in all, it was a book I enjoyed in concept more than while actually reading.-- "What I desire is the full profundity of eros in my life, the 'eternal'."The eternal takes no account of normal time. Would I have fared better if I had read the chapters in their printed order? I don't think so. About halfway through my reading, I came upon an extraordinary passage of normal exposition, in which the writer lays out her movements and partners in chronological order, with names and places and dates. It explained a lot. But this comes in Letter Fourteen! It is not until quite late that we learn who or what "dead little Bunny" is. And I was able to go for most of the book delightfully perplexed that the narrator (who is never named) occasionally seems to refer to herself as "Zoë" -- but this "Zoë" seems to be female at one moment and male the next! The one chapter that goes any way towards explaining this (and then not completely) is Letter Six -- which is the one I happened to read last, making a neat but entirely accidental "Aha!" ending.-- "As she tested the boundaries between fiction, literary autobiography, and lived practice, the line between life and art grew increasingly indistinguishable for Qiu."This last quotation is from Heinrich's helpful afterword. I am struck by his phrase "lived practice" and its implication that the book in our hands is no more than half Qiu's artistic statement. It may not make for easy reading, but it is a unique product of literary art.

Miaojin,I know this letter will reach you too late. Almost 20 years too late, since you died at the age of 26 in 1995. This is the first of your novels to be translated into English, and before reading it, I hadn’t known of your influence on the gay and lesbian culture in Taiwan and in the Chinese-speaking world at large. I wonder what you would have thought of the ascendency of the Internet and the instant globalization of art, literature, ideas.Ah, but you were already ahead of the times, weren’t you? The global outlook of Last Words from Montmartre looks beyond Taiwan and presents a Chinese lesbian living in Paris and travelling to Tokyo, finding and losing lovers along the way. And yet, for all the globetrotting, the book’s focus never veers far. It’s aimed square at the narrator’s heart, a magnifying glass, and the light that comes through sharpens like a laser.It’s tempting to read this book as autobiographical—you, yourself, were studying in Paris with Hélène Cixous at its writing—but I know this is the wrong approach. I get the sense that you blend these elements together—fiction, autobiography, aphorism, journal entry, poetry—to disorient the reader. You want us to inhabit the narrator’s headspace so fully that her feelings of dislocation become our own.And what a dislocation it is. Though you insist that the 20 letters that comprise Last Words can be read in any order, I had to resist piecing together a timeline, organizing your lovers, men and women, in their proper sequence. I apologize: as a reader, I’m used to the comforts of chronology and of psychological causality. But I realize that, for this book, it’s a futile task. You don’t mean to present a standard narrative. You don’t mean to offer the back-and-forth of the traditional epistolary novel. Instead, these letters constitute an eternal present—a pain so palpable that it seems to have no past and no future. It can only be felt now.Can I say that I often could not read more than one letter in a single sitting? Not because of the language—your translator, Ari Larissa Heinrich, has made an excellent effort, rendering your work into colloquial English—but because the emotional intensity can get overwhelming. The depths of your heartbreak seem limitless, and as I plunged deeper and deeper into it, I felt as if the letters were not meant for their intended recipients, but were instead a last will and testament. Indeed, as Heinrich points out, the title can also be translated literally as Last Testament from Montmartre.But here I go again, conflating your narrator with you. Maybe there never was that separation to begin with. Maybe this book exists in the intersection of text and author, just as you lived in the intersection of genders and cultures, in the intersection between Eros and Thanatos. But as your narrator spirals out of control, the letters becoming more disjointed and fragmented, recounting not only her emotional state but her increasing violence towards herself, I think about your own death, at your own hands.Miaojin, I know that you cannot read this letter. I know that time continues on its forward trajectory and that I cannot diverge from it to speak to you directly. But know that I am thinking about your book and that you speak through it still.

I loved this book! highly recommend

Great