Last Words from Montmartre
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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When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre.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.
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At some point in the past, I bookmarked Qiu Miaojin's Wikipedia page. I forget why I looked her up, or why I bookmarked the page, but it sat there on my bookmarks bar for at least a year before I was able to get my hands on a copy of Last Words from Montmartre.
To preface this, I've been through a breakup, and I lived with death by my side for a while afterwards. At that time, I read Murakami's “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.” That book was perfect for me to read at the time. My then-current life events gave me, I think, a greater appreciation for the book than I otherwise would have had. At the very least, if I had read the book earlier, I don't think I would have appreciated it nearly as much.
Perhaps the same would have been true for Last Words from Montmartre. I found myself, now, years later, healed from that experience, and completely unable to relate to Last Words' narrator. I should also say that I was completely unable to divorce the author from the narrator, and read this as nearly factual. I don't think I was wrong in doing this.
The first three-quarters of the book are a plod. The author just keeps going in circles, raging with herself, raging at her ex, and flip-flopping between the stages of grief. The book only gets interesting in the last quarter (which I read last - I didn't want to flip randomly between letters given how they were all, from my perspective, the same). In the last quarter, the narrator loses all sense of identity and it's impossible to make sense of who is who, what is happening, and when it happened. I didn't bother to try, because I took trying to be an exercise in futility. It seemed purposeful to me that this section was such a mess. But even given this mess, I failed to see what was so experimental, and so revolutionary about the novel. And I found myself unable to empathize at all with the author. All I can hope is the Crocodile book is better.
