![]() ![]() 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. 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. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. 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. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile (forthcoming from NYRB Classics) made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. ![]() 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. When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre. ![]()
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