Ebook Last Words from Montmartre New York Review Books Classics Qiu Miaojin Ari Larissa Heinrich Books

Product details Series New York Review Books Classics Paperback 176 pages Publisher NYRB Classics; Main edition (June 3, 2014) Language English ISBN-10 1590177258

Last Words from Montmartre New York Review Books Classics Qiu Miaojin Ari Larissa Heinrich Books Reviews

• This is a surprising novel.
  I felt like talking with the writer. It has influence from Cortazar / carta a una señorita en París/ and her writing style kept me interested at all times.
  Why is this novel in the shadows while Niebla is well known in Latin America?
  I will look for her other writings!
• Definitely an interesting book. The notes on the back are quite accurate and will give you a good sense if this is something that you would be interested in. My short visceral response to this book is "Was it insane because it was so intense or was it intense because it was so insane". Please don't take "insane" literally.
• A brilliant and sad work of fiction that really turned out to be your basic, passive aggressive suicide letter. I hated reading this as I felt like I was encouraging the author's suicide as it was so very apparent that she was in so much pain, but as document in regard to psychology, queer representation and or literature I loved some of it but still felt this great guilt in reading this book.
• Great book (or horrible book) for the lesbianic love sick. Also make sure to read the afterward.
• -- "Oh... if one were to call this book an unintelligible collection of hieroglyphics with no words and a plot that had long since disappeared, one would be right."
  
  Imagine you are in a booth of a restaurant, or perhaps on a train. From behind, you hear a woman talking. Either her companion does not reply, or you don't catch what is said. It is not always easy to understand the main speaker either; there is a lot of talk about love, perhaps love between women, though different partners are mentioned. As most of the proper names are Chinese, you are not sure of the genders. But the speaker is clearly in distress; there are even hints of suicide. Should you intervene? But then the tone changes. You are no longer sure that the speaker is a woman after all. The setting of what s/he is describing is no longer Paris, but Tokyo, or is it Taipei? Several of the same names crop up again. Gradually you guess at a story a passionate affair, betrayals, separation, reunion, determination, pain.
  
  -- "If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written."
  
  I admit to buying this solely on account of this unusual challenge (and because I trust NYRB books). There are twenty "letters" in this epistolary novella, although not all of them are in letter form. The book keeps them in more or less numerical order, although Letter Five comes just before Letter Eleven and there is an additional Letter Seventeen, coming after Letter Ten. I used the randomizing function on my computer, and printed out the resultant order to use as a bookmark 19, 5, 1, 8, and so on. The result was like no other reading experience I have ever had reading as a matter of immersion rather than following a thread, getting to know the narrator from the inside before I had the slightest idea of her biographical facts. If it does not sound sexist to say so, I would call it a profoundly feminine way of reading, rather than my normal let's-get-on-with-it masculine one.
  
  -- "For dead little Bunny / and / Myself, soon dead." Qiu's dedication.
  
  Weeks after completing this manuscript, the author, twenty-six-year-old Qiu Miaojin kills herself. Among other things, this novella is her suicide note, turning her death into an artistic statement rather than an act of despair. Already celebrated as a writer in her native Taiwan (especially among feminist and lesbian circles), she has gone to Paris to join the women's studies program run by novelist Hélène Cixous; the book is laced with references to other feminist writers such as Marguerite Yourcenar and Clarice Lispector. And this being Paris, she embraces cinema as high art, following especially the films of Theodoros Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky. But her main dealings are the interpersonal ones, and most of her writing is about love love lost, love turned to despair, love persisting against all odds, and just occasionally love at the height of sexual passion. I can't say I enjoyed these passages of self-analysis, which can get quite turgid; I don't know whether to put this down to the translator, Ari Larissa Heinrich, or to the author's own confessional earnestness. All in all, it was a book I enjoyed in concept more than while actually reading.
  
  -- "What I desire is the full profundity of eros in my life, the 'eternal'."
  
  The eternal takes no account of normal time. Would I have fared better if I had read the chapters in their printed order? I don't think so. About halfway through my reading, I came upon an extraordinary passage of normal exposition, in which the writer lays out her movements and partners in chronological order, with names and places and dates. It explained a lot. But this comes in Letter Fourteen! It is not until quite late that we learn who or what "dead little Bunny" is. And I was able to go for most of the book delightfully perplexed that the narrator (who is never named) occasionally seems to refer to herself as "Zoë" -- but this "Zoë" seems to be female at one moment and male the next! The one chapter that goes any way towards explaining this (and then not completely) is Letter Six -- which is the one I happened to read last, making a neat but entirely accidental "Aha!" ending.
  
  -- "As she tested the boundaries between fiction, literary autobiography, and lived practice, the line between life and art grew increasingly indistinguishable for Qiu."
  
  This last quotation is from Heinrich's helpful afterword. I am struck by his phrase "lived practice" and its implication that the book in our hands is no more than half Qiu's artistic statement. It may not make for easy reading, but it is a unique product of literary art.
• The sleeve of sets the tone, “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.” As I wrote in my review of Eduoard Leve’s “Suicide”, a work he delivered to his publisher ten days before taking his own life
  
  There is no escaping the fact that this fictional work’s subject matter and Leve’s own suicide lurks large as you read through the work. Although it is meant to be an homage to the narrator’s friend who had committed suicide twenty years earlier you cannot help to be constantly drawn to the tale of Leve’s own death at his own hands less than two weeks after he delivered to manuscript to his editor.
  
  It is a very similar story with Qiu Miaojin’s work, as our translator, Ari Larissa Heinrich, eloquently says in her afterword
  
  Knowing that an author writing about suicide has in fact committed suicide naturally complicates the reading of any book. If nothing else, it suggests that no matter what the author’s claims may be to artifice or character development, there is a degree of “realism” or autobiography to be accounted for that differs from the range of what usually may be called the “semiautobiographical”.
  
  In other words, I’m approaching the last words with a predetermined thought pattern. And one cannot underestimate the powerfulness of this work.
  
  For my full review go to http//messybooker.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/last-words-from-montmartre-qiu-miaojin.html