Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – June 3, 2014

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.

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.

Miaojin,I know this letter will reach you too late. Almost 20 years too late, since you died at the age of 26 in 1995. This is the first of your novels to be translated into English, and before reading it, I hadn’t known of your influence on the gay and lesbian culture in Taiwan and in the Chinese-speaking world at large. I wonder what you would have thought of the ascendency of the Internet and the instant globalization of art, literature, ideas.Ah, but you were already ahead of the times, weren’t you? The global outlook of Last Words from Montmartre looks beyond Taiwan and presents a Chinese lesbian living in Paris and travelling to Tokyo, finding and losing lovers along the way. And yet, for all the globetrotting, the book’s focus never veers far. It’s aimed square at the narrator’s heart, a magnifying glass, and the light that comes through sharpens like a laser.It’s tempting to read this book as autobiographical—you, yourself, were studying in Paris with Hélène Cixous at its writing—but I know this is the wrong approach. I get the sense that you blend these elements together—fiction, autobiography, aphorism, journal entry, poetry—to disorient the reader. You want us to inhabit the narrator’s headspace so fully that her feelings of dislocation become our own.And what a dislocation it is. Though you insist that the 20 letters that comprise Last Words can be read in any order, I had to resist piecing together a timeline, organizing your lovers, men and women, in their proper sequence. I apologize: as a reader, I’m used to the comforts of chronology and of psychological causality. But I realize that, for this book, it’s a futile task. You don’t mean to present a standard narrative. You don’t mean to offer the back-and-forth of the traditional epistolary novel. Instead, these letters constitute an eternal present—a pain so palpable that it seems to have no past and no future. It can only be felt now.Can I say that I often could not read more than one letter in a single sitting? Not because of the language—your translator, Ari Larissa Heinrich, has made an excellent effort, rendering your work into colloquial English—but because the emotional intensity can get overwhelming. The depths of your heartbreak seem limitless, and as I plunged deeper and deeper into it, I felt as if the letters were not meant for their intended recipients, but were instead a last will and testament. Indeed, as Heinrich points out, the title can also be translated literally as Last Testament from Montmartre.But here I go again, conflating your narrator with you. Maybe there never was that separation to begin with. Maybe this book exists in the intersection of text and author, just as you lived in the intersection of genders and cultures, in the intersection between Eros and Thanatos. But as your narrator spirals out of control, the letters becoming more disjointed and fragmented, recounting not only her emotional state but her increasing violence towards herself, I think about your own death, at your own hands.Miaojin, I know that you cannot read this letter. I know that time continues on its forward trajectory and that I cannot diverge from it to speak to you directly. But know that I am thinking about your book and that you speak through it still.

Bought as a required text for a class, content isn't important for the review, but my prof did help translate the writing. Arrived in excellent quality.

Great book (or horrible book) for the lesbianic love sick. Also make sure to read the afterward.

Not recommended for light reading.

Qiu Miaojin blends fiction and reality in her last testament before she died by tragically ending her life. Raw emotions are on display here in this epistolary novel as she gives us the tale of Zoë, a person fraught with passion, desire, grief, hurt, who is writing letters to friends, exes, and the one ex they can’t ever forget, or seem to let go of, Xu. Heavy, but worth it. A powerful read.