Through twenty letters addressed to former lovers, friends and herself, set against the backdrops of Paris, Tokyo and Taipei, the reader is taken through a series of reflections that are unwieldy, at times rueful in their rebellion against structure and linear time, but which nevertheless offer exacting and controlled analysis. Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre contains the main narrator Zoë's final meditations on her relationship and eventual breakup with her former lover, Xu, before her planned suicide. Qiu Miaojin (author), Ari Larissa Heinrich (translator), Last Words from Montmartre, New York Review of Books Classics, 2014. 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 alternative translation of the title) affirms the power of literature.Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre: A Celebration of Life and Death Through Art She feels adrift and alone without the love of her life, Xu, and without Bunny, the pet rabbit they cared for together, and she seeks relief from her overwhelming pain: “I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die.” Qiu’s voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants even as she writes from the familiar perspective of a spurned lover. As the unnamed narrator pursues graduate studies in France, she grows increasingly alienated from her lovers and family still living in Taiwan. Written in the form of letters, the novel vacillates between romantic ecstasy and despair, while a coherent story slowly emerges. Her memorable dedication reads, “For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.” As Heinrich, the translator, explains in the afterword, the book’s spiraling, plotless structure mirrors Qiu’s increasingly intense last days. The reception of this short novel, which is considered a high point in Taiwanese LGBT fiction, will unavoidably be colored by Qiu’s suicide in 1995, at age 26 (the book was written just before her death and posthumously published in Taiwanese).
0 kommentar(er)
