Miao-chin Chiu

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 the Internet culture was about to explode, is also a kind of farewell to letters. The opening note urges us to read the chapters in any order (a tactic which may have prompted the novelist Luo Yijun to describe it as a kind of “lesbian I Ching”). 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.

Last Words from Montmartre

Brianna Hawkins

You ask me what I mean by “devotion.” Devotion means I give you both my body and soul; it means I place both in your hands, and so in turn I desire your body and soul. And you ask me, “Why you? Why not someone else?” Because I can never give myself body and soul so completely to anyone else, and I can never desire someone else, body and soul, so completely.

What I was burying “with my own hands” was actually my love for you and Bunny. Has my love for both of you really ended up in the ground, with nothing left but fantasy and echoes?

My spirit is decaying. Sister, sister, I’m so lonely. I’ve done my best to live as others want me to, but this time it’s serious. I’m afraid I could die at any moment, that’s why I called you. 

lily lily 

My sorrow, my day upon day and night upon night of relentless grief is not for the mess the world is in, and it’s not for my own mortality; it’s for my delicate heart and the wounds it has had to endure. I grieve for all the suffering it has endured.

I envy you. I envy that you are loved completely by a beautiful soul, and that this love can still grow, still adapt, that it can recover from catastrophe, still vital and capable of giving birth to new things.

Please don’t feel burdened by this. It’s just that I still have so much to give; I want to give you everything there is to give.

For three years I’ve given myself to you utterly, loving you completely and totally. Now my hair’s a mess and I can’t put one foot in front of the other, but I’m prepared to return to your side and keep on loving you.

My desire for someone else could never reach the degree of want I feel for you. Do you know all this? So it’s you, just you. There can never be anyone else for the deepest reaches of my body and soul.

My life is “for” her. I know I won’t ever find another human being so beautiful to me, one whom I love for her eyes, forehead, lips, hair, hands, feet, her face, her body, her voice, her scent, her every mannerism, her expressions when she’s talking, the clothes and makeup she wears, her aesthetic sensibilities, the way she gets along so easily with other people and with animals, which is an aspect of her personality that touches me most, and her perceptions and the spiritual issues she shares with me, as well as her unique natural gift for nurturing me, listening to me, giving to me, and loving me. Even when I feel hatred toward her and scream and hit her, I am painfully aware that for me she is excessively—

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