Last Words from Montmartre
  • Published: 1 June 2014
  • ISBN: 9781590177259
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $36.00

Last Words from Montmartre

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A book in a form similar to the I Ching, in Last Words from Montmartre Qiu Miaojin relates her experience living in Paris, communing with a lover in Taiwan, dealing with the confines of gender, ethnicity, culture, sex, and books, and struggling to hold on to the necessary self-worth that keeps one alive.

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When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre.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 Zoë 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 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.
  • Published: 1 June 2014
  • ISBN: 9781590177259
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $36.00
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Praise for Last Words from Montmartre

"Last Words from Montmartre is urgent, ecstatic, unbridled, and breathtakingly intimate. Qiu Miaojin is a writer who truly defies categorization, and this book, her last -- part confession, part love letter, part fiction, part memoir, part suicide note -- is a thrilling testament to her original mind and impassioned heart." --Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

"Moving in its honest revelation of her innermost self, [which is] after all the magic of literature." --Wang Dan, Chinese Tiananmen dissident and Harvard PhD

"Qiu Miaojin...had an exceptional talent. Her voice is assertive, intellectual, witty, lyrical, and intimate. Several years after her death, her works continue to command a huge following." --Tze-lan Deborah Sang

"What makes Kerouac or Salinger timeless is not necessarily literary, but perhaps didactic: the fact that there is wisdom to be found at the fountain of youth, no matter what time one arrives. Of course, there is also a saintliness reserved for those authors who are able to make an interesting life story for themselves, and that order includes Qiu Miaojin." --Bonnie Huie, PEN America blog

"Qiu's unique literary style mingl[es] cerebral, experimental language use, psychological realism, biting social critique through allegory, and a surrealist effect deriving from the use of arrestingly unusual metaphors." --Fran Martin

"Famous for her unapologetic queer themes, she committed suicide at 26 and was posthumously awarded the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature for Notes in 1995." --Autostraddle blog