last words from montmartre by qiu miaojin

Both of Qiu’s novels, as Qiu herself, are treasures and guides for the Taiwanese queer community. By the sheer act of honesty in her writing, Qiu was a political writer. To live in preparation of adversity and finding ways to preserve your core values-this is what it means to learn ‘how to live.’ One can resist persecution from individuals, society, or government. With sincerity, courage, and honesty, one can face death, extreme physical pain, and even extreme psychological pain. I’ve realized this since coming to France. Sincerity, courage, and honesty will deliver humanity.

These letters are for you, the universal reader, the one ‘out there,’ not for her lover to whom they are never sent. The letters cover the gamut of emotions, but the purity of her passion is tempered the self-consciousness of a novelist. Yet since Qiu also hints at her own suicide in her dedication, there’s no pull to begin anywhere – one wants to start where she wanted the story to begin. A master of controlled inner chaos, Qiu instructs the reader before she begins that the letters, which are numbered, do not need to be read in order. You are reading an artist fighting for her life albeit with the awareness and control to use novelistic elements. Composed of twenty letters, don’t take Last Words as if you’re reading someone’s letters to an ex-lover.

My purity is comprised of my physical body, my soul, and my whole life, and I’ve never given this ‘purity’-as unblemished as a piece of white jade-to anyone but you. Last Words from Montmartre is not about these experiences, it is these experiences: being left to sob on the floor as your lover walks out the door, the harrowing pursuit of artistic expression, and the torturous yearning endured at the cross-section of sex and desire. Will writer and reader both make it through this emotional excoriation? Yes because Qiu quickly and deftly makes this epistolary novel explore places emotionally and intellectually she’s been to, hold them up to the light and examine them no matter how much it hurts her or us. Yes, as it begins, it may seem to be the paragon of the break-up novel with page after page of incriminations, recriminations, pleading, apologizing, proselytizing, and declaring. from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, NYRB, 9781590177259, 161 pp. Last Words from Montmartre by Qui Miaojin, trans.

Last words from montmartre by qiu miaojin