As the unnamed narrator pursues graduate studies in France, she grows increasingly alienated from her lovers and family still living in Taiwan. Written in the form of letters, the novel vacillates between romantic ecstasy and despair, while a coherent story slowly emerges. 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. 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).
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.
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. When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre.
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