“I must accept this fate of being abandoned and betrayed; I must accept my helplessness. There’s no way for me not to lose. There’s nothing I can do for myself” (50). So writes the narrator of Last Words from Montmartre, in one of the twenty-one numbered letters that make up the bulk of the text of this book. (It’s more formally experimental than that, though: some of the letters are fragmented, not all have a clear recipient, and it’s not always even clear who the narrator is. The letters are not printed entirely in numerical order, and there’s a note at the beginning saying that “readers can begin anywhere.”)
The narrator is lamenting a lost love, a failed relationship, a betrayal, and the narrative is often very interior, and somewhat circular and abstract. It’s uncomfortable to be with the narrator in these first-person loops of thought, the obsessive writing about the beloved, about the pain of living. “I don’t like it that there’s so much wounding in the world. If there persists in being so much wounding in the world, I don’t want to live in it,” the narrator says (8). And then: “I want to become someone else. This is the single best thing I could do for myself. I know that I have to change my identity, live under an assumed name. I have to cry. I have to live by transforming myself into someone else” (9). “Your inner life and mine are symbiotic,” the narrator says (19). “Unless you want to shut it down completely—to castrate it—your inner life will never be complete with anyone but me” (ibid.). And later: “Whether our love is worth it or not is irrelevant. So what if there’s someone nicer than you or prettier than you— it doesn’t change a thing. Come and hurt me more. You still mean the same to me: I belong to you” (73).
There are moments of hope and energy: I like this, which appears at the start of the sixth letter: “All of a sudden my new life is like a field overgrown with strange flowers and exotic grasses or the shimmering, starry sky of my unbridled imagination” (30). And I like the concrete moments of joy or delight, passages about the larger world and the narrator’s existence in it: when she talks about going to see the films of Theodoros Angelopoulos, or about a lover swimming naked in the Seine, or about walking through the Latin Quarter with friends on a drizzly night, or a visit to Tokyo in cherry-blossom season. In the afterword to this translation, Ari Larissa Heinrich writes this, which I think captures a lot about how this book feels: messy, and uncomfortable, and true:
Qiu refuses to edit the ugliness out of a text that is also sublime in its sensitive portrayal of someone’s quests for truth. Her accomplishment is precisely that her novel does not shield us from ugliness; it is raw self-exposure and we are meant to see it, ride the awkwardness of it, feel the self-hatred and anger and ambivalence behind it even as we are invited to identify deeper into the novel. (160)
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