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A review by mitzee
The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville
adventurous
challenging
informative
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
Damn it really took me five days to read this 5.5 hour book because it was so confusing at first. No fault of the author but the concepts of what is being described are so foreign that it’s incredibly hard to imagine them while keeping up with the pace at which things are happening.
The concept of the story is fascinating and I love the imagination involved, but I definitely had to go back and re-listen to parts of the story again to make sure I was hearing right.
Would recommend this for any fans of surrealist art or just Chinese Miéville in general.
Including a summary for my own reference:
This takes place in warring France at what is supposed to be the tail end of WWII. There’s two concurrent story lines that the book jumps between. 1950 and 1942. In 1950 Marseille we follow Thibaut, a French fighter and Sam, an American photographer who are fleeing from and sometimes fighting the Nazis as well as living images and sometimes text: Surrealist art and ideas manifested into real life.
In 1941, an American engineer who is also obsessed with the occult, Jack Parsons, finds himself with a new machine he built: an engine, that can bring ideas, hopes, dreams, images into a visible and tangible form. One night, after he shows it off to some exiled revolutionaries, diplomats, and artists in an effort to impress them (which it does) he finds it missing from his hotel room.
Elsewhere in France, the person who stole it from him is trying to sell it and that’s how it winds up in the hands of German nazis, in a raid on the bar where he is making a deal to sell.
There’s a part of what happens that isn’t very clearly spelled out. I think it’s vaguely described as an “s-bomb” and a big magic event that combines the occult with this engine and explodes manifestations (or Manifs) into being within the 9th arrondissement.
The result is what Sam and Thibaut, strangers to each other until they decide to stay together, are living in. This means the Free French, Nazis, and Mana Plume have been fighting the Manifs and each other for almost a decade.
It turns out that Sam is not actually a human but sent from the devil, from hell, a demon? And is there to help stop the Germans who have been experimenting with the occult and trying to raise demons to fight for them - against the Manifs and the Mana Plume.
The book ends with them seeing Adolf Hitler’s self portrait - a manifestation itself - going around Paris and building it anew by just LOOKING at them. He would LOOK and a new building would just appear. He looked at Sam and just disappeared her. Thibaut stayed alive and hid her photos and journals at the border of the arrondissement for someone to find someday and went back to fighting.
In the afterword, it sounds like the author was reached out to by a former classmate and connected with a French man who told him all this story. Spoke about Thiabaut in third person but was pretty sure he was Thiabaut and that he came from another timeline. There’s no explanation of how he got to ours but that the things he said happened, really did happen.
The concept of the story is fascinating and I love the imagination involved, but I definitely had to go back and re-listen to parts of the story again to make sure I was hearing right.
Would recommend this for any fans of surrealist art or just Chinese Miéville in general.
Including a summary for my own reference:
This takes place in warring France at what is supposed to be the tail end of WWII. There’s two concurrent story lines that the book jumps between. 1950 and 1942. In 1950 Marseille we follow Thibaut, a French fighter and Sam, an American photographer who are fleeing from and sometimes fighting the Nazis as well as living images and sometimes text: Surrealist art and ideas manifested into real life.
In 1941, an American engineer who is also obsessed with the occult, Jack Parsons, finds himself with a new machine he built: an engine, that can bring ideas, hopes, dreams, images into a visible and tangible form. One night, after he shows it off to some exiled revolutionaries, diplomats, and artists in an effort to impress them (which it does) he finds it missing from his hotel room.
Elsewhere in France, the person who stole it from him is trying to sell it and that’s how it winds up in the hands of German nazis, in a raid on the bar where he is making a deal to sell.
There’s a part of what happens that isn’t very clearly spelled out. I think it’s vaguely described as an “s-bomb” and a big magic event that combines the occult with this engine and explodes manifestations (or Manifs) into being within the 9th arrondissement.
The result is what Sam and Thibaut, strangers to each other until they decide to stay together, are living in. This means the Free French, Nazis, and Mana Plume have been fighting the Manifs and each other for almost a decade.
It turns out that Sam is not actually a human but sent from the devil, from hell, a demon? And is there to help stop the Germans who have been experimenting with the occult and trying to raise demons to fight for them - against the Manifs and the Mana Plume.
The book ends with them seeing Adolf Hitler’s self portrait - a manifestation itself - going around Paris and building it anew by just LOOKING at them. He would LOOK and a new building would just appear. He looked at Sam and just disappeared her. Thibaut stayed alive and hid her photos and journals at the border of the arrondissement for someone to find someday and went back to fighting.
In the afterword, it sounds like the author was reached out to by a former classmate and connected with a French man who told him all this story. Spoke about Thiabaut in third person but was pretty sure he was Thiabaut and that he came from another timeline. There’s no explanation of how he got to ours but that the things he said happened, really did happen.