The Last Days of New Paris
Ratings18
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings18
Average rating3.5
Weaving together the historical and the imagined, China Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris is a surreal and extraordinary work, from the author of The City & The City. 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer and occult disciple Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world for ever. 1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts - and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, Thibaut must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties - to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.
Reviews with the most likes.
A kind of love letter to surrealism set in war time Paris. This novella is strange. Within these pages the imaginations of surrealist artists have become flesh and are warring against devils and demons from the imagination of the Nazis with the human population caught in the cross fire. Everything about this is kind of out there. The prose is beautiful but the strangeness off the story makes it a difficult beast for me to properly engage with.
Fun concept and the story zips along nicely. A bit flat emotionally.
I get that this is supposed to be weird. I get (some of) what the Surrealists were trying to do and the context in which they were thinking. I even kinda get the origins of this novella after reading the explanation after finishing it. It still didn't really capture me. Sure, it's fun and weird to think about this alternate history, but I couldn't really let myself float into it and allow subconscious reaction. I even tried when I couldn't relax into it, which didn't exactly help. Instead, the constant name-dropping and switches in timeline forced a constant running critic, attempting to keep track and think about whether I should have known about someone. Ultimately, an interesting piece, but only okay.
I love the idea of surrealist objets d'art becoming living, breathing things that exist in the world, and of the recasting of Freud's life and death instincts as instincts between surrealism and fascism.
But for a novel that's about surrealism, having literal, actual Nazis teaming up with literal, actual demons seems a little too on the nose.
