Tag Archives: genre: suspense/thriller

Last Words From Montmartre

authors, fiction, romance, suspense / thriller February 9, 2017 Leave a comment

I saw Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words From Montmartre at the Strand Bookstore down in the city on one of their tables. I think it was pre-owned because it was super cheap ($6-ish) and I bought it because the back read like it was going to be an exciting psychological thriller.

This book also satisfied a requirement on the list I lost last year, but I really thought it was going to be super exciting from the blurb on the back cover:

When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre.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. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.

It wasn’t sublime. It wasn’t thrilling. It was 176 pages of a woman feeling sorry for herself and being pathetic. I hated it.

I was excited about all aspects of it – a genre and gender bending queer romantic thriller taking place in far away, exotic cities? Am I tall enough to get on the ride? Sign me up.

And when I got off the ride, I got the distinct impression that I was misled on purpose. I found the unnamed narrator (another aspect of the story I liked, as it was reminiscent of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca, another romantic thriller with an unnamed narrator) whiny, self-indulgent, and as I said earlier, pathetic.

Maybe it’s because of who I am personally, but I have never liked self-pitying wallowers. I understand being depressed after a passionate relationship ends. Eventually, though, pull it together and get over it. Go on living. I always respected myself too much to let my relationship to a significant other define me. I never gave him that kind of power and I have trouble respecting women who do give their significant others, male of female, that kind of power. The relationship in the story, from what I remember now, wasn’t an abusive relationship of any kind, so it’s not that kind of inequality that would trigger someone being unable to leave or be truly damaged by abusive behavior. It was just some woman who couldn’t/wouldn’t get over a breakup.

I had no problem with the translation. Ari Larissa Heinrich did a great job. I can’t comment on the original language, but I thought it was beautifully written and therefore must have been beautifully translated.

My distinct reaction of dislike may be a defect of me personally because a lot of people love this book and comment endlessly on the genius of the author. She has other projects people rave about (though I have no inclination to discover them). Qiu Miaojin committed suicide, which, although I loathe admitting it, darkly fascinates me and is one of the reasons I thought this book would be good. It can be read as her suicide note? What does that mean? How interesting! Let’s find out.

I FOUND OUT. I HATED IT. I WAS GLAD THE NARRATOR WAS SETTING OFF TO KILL HERSELF.

Obviously I feel bad about the author because she was a real person, but the narrator? Nah.

This isn’t the first “great book” where my reaction was one of intense dislike to what I considered to be a whiny, pathetic narrator. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley really rubbed me the wrong way too, and I was only a 16 year old high school sophomore when I read that. But it was the same kind of thing. The narrator went on ENDLESSLY, wallowing in self-indulgent nonsense and oooooh poor him.

I can’t remember for sure 13 years later but I think that narrator commits suicide at the end too and I think my reaction was the same. “Good riddance.”

I would be more specific and look up more details of this book for this post, but I gave it to a friend and she never gave it back, which was fine. I haven’t asked for it back. I don’t want it back. It was $6ish, 176 pages, and 3 or 4 hours I’ll never get back.

It was disappointing enough without remembering all the specific details.

The Quiet Twin

fiction, history, suspense / thriller March 16, 2016 Leave a comment

I’m starting this post with a plug.

I bought The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta at The Mysterious Bookshop at 58 Warren St. in New York City. I looooove The Mysterious Bookshop. I have a soft spot for independent bookstores and The Mysterious Bookshop is definitely one of my favorites.

The cozy one room store is floor to 12? 15? foot ceiling wooden bookshelves and tables, at least half the back wall is dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, but the rest of the store is full of mysteries and thrillers from all over the world. The green carpet is dated and so is the oversized furniture,  and while many books are new some of the books are used, but it’s extremely easy for any mystery book lover to overlook the antiquated atmosphere and spend an hour? afternoon? day? going through everything from Victorian crime fiction to historical suspense thrillers.

…which brings me back to The Quiet Twin. The story is set in 1939, Nazi-occupied Vienna, in an apartment complex with an inner courtyard. A series of murders have taken place through the city and when Professor Speckstein’s dog ends up murdered as well, he wants to know who did it and why. He enlists the help of Dr. Beer, a physician who lives in the building. Before long, Dr. Beer is in the bedroom of Professor Speckstein’s teenage niece, Zuzka, who is not obviously ill but insists on seeing him. She shows the doctor the oddities of their neighbors she has learned just by watching them through their windows.

By the way, Professor Speckstein is the neighborhood Zellenleiter, an informant for the Nazi party. He’s also a sex offender.

There are a lot of characters in this story, and each one has any number of things to hide.

I kept waiting for the twin to show up, but it becomes obvious, as you read the story, that the twin Vyleta is referring to is the side of ourselves that nobody sees, the secrets we hide from the world, “The Stranger” as Billy Joel would call it.

In this book, Vyleta focuses on what happens to ordinary people when they live in an atmosphere of constant paranoia, and suspicion, where they are constantly being spied on. While the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots of the world commit the greatest atrocities, how do regular, usually peaceful people become insidiously complicit? Vyleta seems to suggest they’re petty crimes of opportunity: small betrayals that we may overlook, or may not even remember that we commit, in an effort to secure our own safety.

In retrospect, it is easy to condemn the action and non-action of the populations of Germany and the rest of Europe during the second World War. It’s easy to say now that we would never get caught up in something so violent, that we would condemn something so horrific, that we’d never inform on our neighbors and friends in an attempt to protect ourselves. But would we? Vyleta explores this, and its consequences throughout the story.

A couple of things:

1] The ending is horrifically unsatisfying and bitter. I’ve just found out that there is a sequel, so I’m about to go buy that, but I’m a little nervous that it’s going to be even more unsatisfying than this one.

2] There aren’t many characters to like. In fact, of all of them, I think I liked only two. Don’t get me wrong: I found the characters interesting, I just didn’t particularly like them. Vyleta does some of this on purpose, I’m sure.

3] It can be a bit of a slow read. The atmosphere is tense, but there are long stretches where you just want to speed it up a bit. I found that to be the case anyway.

Overall, though, The Quiet Twin is by far the best book I read in 2015. Suspenseful, disturbing, and a fascinatingly introspective look into human nature during a time where everyone’s actions had the potential to be touched by the creeping evil of Nazi culture, I highly recommend it.