The Last Days of New Paris

A kind of love letter to surrealism set in war time Paris. This novella is strange. Within these pages the imaginations of surrealist artists have become flesh and are warring against devils and demons from the imagination of the Nazis with the human population caught in the cross fire. Everything about this is kind of out there. The prose is beautiful but the strangeness off the story makes it a difficult beast for me to properly engage with.

I get that this is supposed to be weird. I get (some of) what the Surrealists were trying to do and the context in which they were thinking. I even kinda get the origins of this novella after reading the explanation after finishing it. It still didn't really capture me. Sure, it's fun and weird to think about this alternate history, but I couldn't really let myself float into it and allow subconscious reaction. I even tried when I couldn't relax into it, which didn't exactly help. Instead, the constant name-dropping and switches in timeline forced a constant running critic, attempting to keep track and think about whether I should have known about someone. Ultimately, an interesting piece, but only okay.

I love the idea of surrealist objets d'art becoming living, breathing things that exist in the world, and of the recasting of Freud's life and death instincts as instincts between surrealism and fascism.

But for a novel that's about surrealism, having literal, actual Nazis teaming up with literal, actual demons seems a little too on the nose.

Maybe my rating for this is closer to 3.75/5.

There are two types of readers: those who research a book before they read it and those who go into it blind. Well, I guess some people read books and then read notes during it. Okay, maybe this note wasn't as strong as I thought it was to start on. My whole point is these are the decisions one can make when diving into The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville.

I am familiar with Miéville from his novel, Perdido Street Station, which is one of my favorites. After getting through that one, I immediately looked up his bibliography to see what more of his works I could experience. I read the synopsis of this particular one and decided, heck yeah, I am going to read this one next. The surrealism and imagery of Miéville's prose were some of my favorite things in Perdido Street Station, so I was looking forward to it.

Reading this was certainly an...experience. One that I feel like I enjoyed for the most part.

The premise is already attention-grabbing. Paris has changed: after the detonation of a bomb with extraordinary powers, the city is overrun now. Nazis still occupy the city, but alongside them, artwork from surreal artists have been given life. Creatures of frightening imagination, referred to by manifs, beyond what true reality could ever host roam the streets amid the fighting. The landscape itself has changed to this beautiful and nightmarish surrealism. On top of that, demons from Hell have joined the fray. Yeah, it's a wild time.

The plot follows two storylines: one set in "present-day" with a soldier known as Thibault fighting against the Nazis and demons while surviving the odd manifs. He meets a woman named Sam, and he helps her on her journey to find a certain something for a book she's writing. The other timeline centers around a man named Jack Parson and focuses on how this dream-esque situation.

I can tell you right now that I don't have any knowledge of art and history that goes beyond the level of basic, which made reading this an interesting experience. I didn't do any research or look up any context notes before diving in. There are references up the wazoo, and I mean it. Unless you have a major in Surrealism Art and History, I feel like many of the references will fly straight over your head. That's at least how it happened to me. Countless names were dropped and I had no clue where I had no clue what its real-world equivalent was.

I will say, for many people, this will probably turn them off. If not that, then the poetic, flowery prose and purposefully obscured narrative will. This is a book I imagine will appeal only to a niche audience.

I guess I am in that audience.

Even if I didn't understand anything, the way that Miéville described it was beautiful. Where my lack of knowledge spanned, I used Miéville's descriptions to fill in the blanks and conjure up an image as much as I could. He would describe a manif to the reader in all its surreal glory, and I would have to try and understand what it looked like from my understanding, I feel like it did something to paint an even more vivid picture for me, as strange as that sounds. It gave me a workout for my imagination as I did my best to imagine what these things could even look like in real life if they were standing right before me.

Miéville's prose is poetic and beautiful, but hard to understand. He is the kind of author where you have to have a dictionary open next to you (thank god for Libby's define feature) to understand many of the words he throws out. He uses haunting imagery in such an evocative way. Describing surrealism is something that I imagine is very, very hard to do. How do you describe something that doesn't conform to any of our laws of physics, that goes beyond all the rules that we hold dear? It's an incredible feat to pull off, and I think Miéville does it well. He has just the right balance of grounded descriptions and dreamy imagery to put it all together. I'm still thinking about his line where he describes the moon in the sky. I think it's one of the more popular quotes in the book.

The plot itself? While it felt it meandered in the middle, I was hooked enough by the imagery and the description of this gutted, strange Paris that I didn't mind. It's equal amounts of experience and story, in my opinion. Like many books (I'm noting this seems to be a trend), it ramped up in the last 20-30% where stakes skyrocketed, and it really pushed me towards the end.

There is a final section in the book that I don't want to get too far into since it might be spoiler activity, but it's a very interesting whiplash and almost like a food-for-thought kind of deal going on with how it bookends the story. I'll be honest, my interest waned here...I came here for surreal imagery mixed with the mundane, one of my favorite contrasts to see in art, and that's where my interest mostly lies. But I don't want to say I didn't care for it or that I disliked it, as I think it's a valuable part of the overall content.

My biggest complaint: As much as I liked this book, I didn't rate it 4 stars and it falls short of Miéville's great Perdido Street Station because, even though I understand this was the vibe he was going for, the narrative at times felt too muddled from the story. I get it, in a story about surrealism, the prose should reflect that theme. And I think it does greatly in some ways! But in others, I feel like it made it harder for me to follow along. It made it that much harder to connect with the characters, but like I said, I think this is a book that's not trying to emphasize those parts. It really feels like it's mostly here to give a reader an experience of the world and how the people are affected by it, which I say it did pretty well. It's too bad, I just felt a little too detached from the story and characters themselves to feel any impact from them, which in turn, causes me the entire book to have less impact on me since they're aspects of the story too.

Even if I don't like it as much as Perdido Street Station. it was still a good book and I enjoyed it. I fall very much into the niche of who this book appeals to. I love surreal imagery, and I love it even more when it's placed into the space of the mundane, and we humans are left grappling with the paradoxical contrast. I feel like for many, this book is not going to hit the mark. But for those who vibe on the same wavelength as this novel, we got something out of it.