Do you remember how “it” felt before the Internet? Part of the marvel of this small obsessive book is that it falls exactly into that glowing breach. And one can’t ignore the peculiarity of the moment of its composition, 1995, which might’ve been the last true analog year. It is as if Goethe killed himself right after Werther or Chris Kraus after I Love Dick. The sensational quality (and here I mean the sensations one feels when encountering a book by an author who killed herself upon its completion) of its content in relation to its seeming parallels with Qiu Miaojin’s life is an inextricable part of the reading.
At the time of her death she was living in Paris-leading a lively and queer intellectual life very much like the narrator of this 161-page epistolary novel. Nineteen years ago, at the age of twenty-six, Qiu Miaojin, a much-lauded Taiwanese novelist, killed herself.
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