This coming Tuesday, NYRB Classics will be publishing Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich. I’ll be posting more on this sad, powerful book next week, but as it turns out I have an extra copy to giveaway. I’ll leave you with the cover and the publisher’s blurb.
When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre.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.
Please enter the giveaway by filling out the form below. You can enter once per day until next Tuesday, when the winner will be selected.
What a coincidence! I just learned about this author via a panel I attended at the PEN World Festival. Participating was the translator of another of Miaojin’s novel – Notes of a Crocodile. Bonnie Huie, the translator, gave a wonderful reading. I can’t wait to read your review; from the little bit you wrote above it seems you liked it.
That book is going to be released by NYRB Classics too, though I don’t yet know when.
This sounds amazing. The “read in any order” is reminiscent of Hopscotch by Cortázar.
The winner!
First Name: Colin
Last Name: Crane-Smith
Get in touch, Colin!