Last Words from Montmartre [Paperback]

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When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece,Last Words from Montmartre.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 Wordstells 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’sConfessions of a Mask, Goethe’sThe Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’sDictée, to name but a few,Last Words from Montmartreproves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation. I’d put Last Words in a category that includes much of Kathy Acker and Henry Miller. Stein, too...It’s a deeply personal text. Yet it bears reading and rereading an abundance of times. —Eileen Myles, Bookforum

Qiu’s voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants.... It would be wrong to interpret the book’s—or, for that matter, the author’s—ultimate surrender to death as a rejection of the richness of life; rather, like Goethe’s young Werther, this 'last testament' (an alternatls,