Qiu Miaojin Last Words From Montmartre Paperback Book

An NYRB Classics Original Last Words from Montmartre is a novel in letters that narrates the gradual dissolution of a relationship between two lovers and, ultimately, the complete unraveling of the narrator. In a voice that veers between extremes, from selfdeprecation to hubris, compulsive repetition to sublime reflection, reticence to vulnerability, it can be read as both the authors masterpiece and a labor of love, as well as her own suicide note. Last Words from Montmartre, written just as Internet culture was about to explode, is also a kind of farewell to letters. The opening note urges us to read the letters in any order. Each letter unfolds as a chapter, the narrator writing from Paris to her lover in Taipei and to family and friendsin Taiwan and Tokyo. The book opens with the death of a beloved pet rabbit and closes with a portentous expression of the narrators resolve to kill herself. In between we follow Qius protagonist into the streets of Montmartre into descriptions of affairs with both men and women, French and Taiwanese into rhapsodic musings on the works of Theodoros Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky and into wrenching and cleareyed outlines of what it means to exist not only between cultures but, to a certainextent, between and among genders. More Confessions of a Mask than Well of Loneliness, the novel marks Qiu as one of the finest experimentalist and modernist Chineselanguage writers of our generation | Qiu Miaojin Last Words From Montmartre Paperback Book