Why a Booktrail?
1995: Letters of a love affair from Paris, Taipei and Tokyo
Last Words from Montmartre
What you need to know before your trail
When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.
The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed.
Locations
Reset- France - Paris
- A: Montmartre
- B: Rue de Mont-Cenis
- Taiwan - Taipei
- C: New Taipei City
- Japan - Tokyo
- D: Narita
- E: Tokyo central
Travel Guide
Cultures and locations of Last Words from Montmartre
Locations and cultures are there to show differences, fleeting moments in time and travel and that where love is concerned, some things are universal…
“I wanted to board the plane with you, to show our boarding passes to the flight attendant together, sit side by side and talk until I put my head on your shoulder as you read and slept, and then wake up to together and listen to music, watch a movie, go to the bathroom… Maybe we’d fall asleep again then wake up to another meal only slightly more appetising than the first and watch the shifting cloud formations outside the window together, and hear the captain announcing that we were about to land in Hong Kong, about to land in Malaysia, about to land in Paris…
Do I think too much? All I really want is to fly with you.”
“Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but ‘love’ means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. ‘Love’ is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one’s own in relation to those of the other.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Last Words from Montmartre
Destination: Paris, Tapei, Tokyo Author/guide: Qiu Miaojin Departure Time: 1995
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