last words from montmartre by qiu miaojin

At one point, she studied under the French feminist scholar Hélèn Cixous, which greatly influenced the writing of Last Words from Montmartre. Qiu graduated from National Taiwan University and left for graduate study in Paris in 1994. Notes of a Crocodile has just been added to the long list for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize. The series includes only four modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the other two being Eileen Chang’s works.

They have recently been translated into English (by Bonnie Huie and Ari Larissa Heinrich respectively) and published by the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics. Both novels are now recognised as part of the lesbian literary canon. More Confessions of a Mask than Well of Loneliness, the novel marks Qiu as one of the finest experimentalist and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.The Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin (1969-1995) committed suicide in Paris aged twenty-six, leaving behind a handful of short stories and two full length novels, Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Last Words from Montmartre (1996). In between we follow Qiu's 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 clear-eyed outlines of what it means to exist not only between cultures but, to a certain extent, between and among genders. The book opens with the death of a beloved pet rabbit and closes with a portentous expression of the narrator's resolve to kill herself. Each letter unfolds as a chapter, the narrator writing from Paris to her lover in Taipei and to family and friends in Taiwan and Tokyo. The opening note urges us to read the letters in any order.

Last Words from Montmartre, written just as Internet culture was about to explode, is also a kind of farewell to letters. In a voice that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to hubris, compulsive repetition to sublime reflection, reticence to vulnerability, it can be read as both the author's masterpiece and a labor of love, as well as her own suicide note. 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.

Last words from montmartre by qiu miaojin