a

Really more like 2.5 stars.

This book had a lot of interesting ideas, such as magic undergoing some sort of reversal around the birth of Christ, but most of the interesting ideas either weren't explored enough in favor of the swashbuckling adventures of the time-traveling protagonist, who I never really took a shining to.
Brendan Doyle always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow survive by the skin of his teeth. He's not really that likeable, has some tragic backstory about his wife that is set up to be super-traumatic but barely plays into his character, and becomes annoyingly fatalistic in the second half of the book. I think it says something that I often found myself rooting for the antagonists, who always (from their perspective) got the short end of the stick from this annoyingly persistent and should-be-harmless protagonist, and most of whom have the sympathetic goal of rewriting history so that Egypt maintains its independence from British rule.

Reading the other reviews, apparently this is often described as a steampunk book, but it is really not in the slightest, so if that's what you're in it for, look elsewhere. All in all, it was a decently interesting book that kept me reading more from a passing “let's see what happens” as opposed to an attachment to any particular character or plot-thread.

Overall decent story and interesting world with some interesting characters, but the prose and editing left a LOT to be desired. A lot of missing semicolons (pet peeve I guess) and it felt often that scenes and transitional actions were missing. Also not a whole lot of description in terms of what things look like so it's mostly up to your imagination - could be a stylistic choice and could be considered bad or good but I felt neutral about that. Also, I went in expecting more of a science-fantasy gaspunk aesthetic but it turned out to be more sci-fi post-apocalyptic, which I usually dislike but this time it was alright.

I didn't get it

At some point in the past, I bookmarked Qiu Miaojin's Wikipedia page. I forget why I looked her up, or why I bookmarked the page, but it sat there on my bookmarks bar for at least a year before I was able to get my hands on a copy of Last Words from Montmartre.

To preface this, I've been through a breakup, and I lived with death by my side for a while afterwards. At that time, I read Murakami's “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.” That book was perfect for me to read at the time. My then-current life events gave me, I think, a greater appreciation for the book than I otherwise would have had. At the very least, if I had read the book earlier, I don't think I would have appreciated it nearly as much.

Perhaps the same would have been true for Last Words from Montmartre. I found myself, now, years later, healed from that experience, and completely unable to relate to Last Words' narrator. I should also say that I was completely unable to divorce the author from the narrator, and read this as nearly factual. I don't think I was wrong in doing this.

The first three-quarters of the book are a plod. The author just keeps going in circles, raging with herself, raging at her ex, and flip-flopping between the stages of grief. The book only gets interesting in the last quarter (which I read last - I didn't want to flip randomly between letters given how they were all, from my perspective, the same). In the last quarter, the narrator loses all sense of identity and it's impossible to make sense of who is who, what is happening, and when it happened. I didn't bother to try, because I took trying to be an exercise in futility. It seemed purposeful to me that this section was such a mess. But even given this mess, I failed to see what was so experimental, and so revolutionary about the novel. And I found myself unable to empathize at all with the author. All I can hope is the Crocodile book is better.

Short sci-fi read focused on the relations between two uneducated families, and some visitors, in a little oasis amid a world that's been destroyed by a red tide. There was a weird focus on miscegenation, but I wasn't around in the 70's to know if that was a reflection/rebuke of real-world sentiments. The patriarchs of either family were also uncomfortably boorish, but luckily the POV switches to the children later on. Overall, somewhat interesting, but you're not missing much if you skip it (although it is very short - I'm a slow reader and I managed to get through it in an evening).