July 10, 2017
Qiu’s novel, originally published in 1994 and now translated into English for the first time, follows a young college student, nicknamed Lazi, as she comes to terms with her homosexuality in late-1980s Taipei, shortly after the lifting of Taiwan’s long-standing martial law. Most of the novel chronicles Lazi’s on-again, off-again toxic romance with classmate Shui Ling, who leaves her miserable and obsessed. As Lazi meanders from apartments and classes, trying to figure out the mysteries of love, she sees herself as a crocodile, a character that appears in several brief chapters and that dresses as a human, afraid to show its true self as it goes about its life. Lazi also strikes up friendships with Chu Kuang, his sometimes-boyfriend Meng Sheng, and girlfriends Tun Tun and Zhi Rou, who all appear at various intervals to offer Lazi support and companionship. Qiu (Last Words from Montmartre), who died at the age of 26, creates a relatively plotless coming-of-age tale that once challenged norms, but in 2017, Lazi’s adventures are relatively tame. Though intriguing, the novel is slightly unfocused, and Lazi’s observations are frequently overwrought with youthful naïveté. Still, as a piece of counterculture literature, the novel is worth examination.
March 1, 2017
A college student's romantic obsession with another woman threatens to derail her happiness.Taipei in the late 1980s. Lazi is 18, newly enrolled in college, and describes herself as "an innately beautiful peacock" who is "pure carrion inside." Depressed and self-harming over her attraction to women, Lazi enters into a toxic relationship with Shui Ling, a fellow student. During the course of their on-again, off-again unconsummated relationship, Lazi turns to a group of friends whose love lives are as complicated as her own. Qiu (Last Words from Montmartre, 2014), who died in 1995 at the age of 26, structures her essentially plotless novel as a series of eight notebooks that take us through Lazi's college years. These notebooks can be unabashedly adolescent--sentences like "The glow on her face was like rays of sunshine along a golden beach" abound. Also true to the college experience are the long pages of abstract conversation Lazi and her friends engage in, usually late at night. But in many ways, Qiu's willingness to show youth at its most self-absorbed and earnest is part of the book's appeal. Most readers--perhaps especially those who identify as LGBTQ--will see themselves somewhere in Lazi's agonized social circle. But Qiu also reminds her readers at every turn how truly isolating otherness can be: interspersed with Lazi's musings, Qiu tells a kind of surreal, contemporary fable of a crocodile, the subject of equal parts bigotry and misplaced reverence. The crocodile's plight, as it "got home from work [and] removed the sweat-soaked human suit clinging to its body," serves as an odd, but perfect, metaphor for Lazi, whose true heartbreak is feeling so alien as to scarcely feel human. A meandering, but moving, look at queer identity.
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