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Last Words from Montmartre / Qiu Miaojin ; translated and with an introduction by Ari Larissa Heinrich.
Van Pelt Library PR9470.9.M53 L3713 2014
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Qiu, Miaojin, 1969-1995.
- Series:
- New York Review Books classics
- New York Review Books Classics
- Language:
- Chinese
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Lesbian authors--Fiction.
- Lesbian authors.
- Genre:
- Psychological fiction.
- Epistolary fiction.
- Love stories.
- Biographical fiction.
- Fiction.
- Physical Description:
- 161 pages ; 21 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : New York Review Books, 2014.
- Language Note:
- Originally published in 1969.
- Summary:
- "An NYRB Classics Original Last Words from Montmartre is a novel in letters that narrates the gradual dissolution of a relationship between two lovers and, ultimately, the complete unraveling of the narrator. In a voice that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to hubris, compulsive repetition to sublime reflection, reticence to vulnerability, it can be read as both the author's masterpiece and a labor of love, as well as her own suicide note. Last Words from Montmartre, written just as Internet culture was about to explode, is also a kind of farewell to letters. The opening note urges us to read the letters in any order. Each letter unfolds as a chapter, the narrator writing from Paris to her lover in Taipei and to family and friends in Taiwan and Tokyo. The book opens with the death of a beloved pet rabbit and closes with a portentous expression of the narrator's resolve to kill herself. In between we follow Qiu's protagonist into the streets of Montmartre; into descriptions of affairs with both men and women, French and Taiwanese; into rhapsodic musings on the works of Theodoros Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky; and into wrenching and clear-eyed outlines of what it means to exist not only between cultures but, to a certain extent, between and among genders. More Confessions of a Mask than Well of Loneliness, the novel marks Qiu as one of the finest experimentalist and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation"-- Provided by publisher.
- Contains:
- Qiu, Miaojin, 1969-1995. Works. Selections. English
- ISBN:
- 9781590177259
- 1590177258
- OCLC:
- 858126076
- Online:
- Cover image
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