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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suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished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." 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. 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 letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap
between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights
into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and
genders--until the genderless character Zoe appears, and the
narrator's spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As
powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima's "Confessions of a
Mask," Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," and Theresa Cha's
"Dictee," 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.
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