![]() ![]() ![]() The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written. If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. First, there is the dark dedication:Īnd then there are Qiu’s statement to whoever ends up reading the book: I was struck by two things when I flipped through the pages that precede the text itself. This is classified as a work of fiction, yet the book itself seems to be part of Qiu’s effort, in her last months, to examine her life and her passion, with the end goal seemingly in sight all along. We get from that brief, promising biography to early 1995 and the “letters” that make up Last Words from Montmartre. At the time, she had received a great deal of acclaim for her 1994 novel, Notes of a Crocodile, which is forthcoming from NYRB Classics and is, according to translator Bonnie Huie, a kind of “survival manual for teenagers” (see here). She was forthright about her homosexuality, and thanks to the revocation of martial law in Taiwain in 1987, after 38 years and when Qiu was just finishing high school, she exercised her strong journalistic voice. Qiu Miaojin was only 26 when, on June 25, 1995, she killed herself in Paris, where she had moved to in 1994 to study and where she had worked as a counselor. ![]()
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