THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS: full review

Abstract: THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS by China Miéville awakens our sense of wonder with the explosion of imagery, of erudition, and of poetry that the book contains. The novella embodies what it describes: the surrealist Resistance to the Nazi occupation of Paris has led to the creation of a surrealist bomb, whose explosion produces an “S-Blast” that has liberated a myriad of “manifestations”, impossible entities freed from surrealist painting and sculptures to wreak havoc on the Nazi occupying forces. The novel is at once a masterfully told story and an inspiring manifesto, an ode to the liberating power of poetic fantasy, and to the creations, and the lives, of those who are steeped in it. The poetry, the beauty, the freedom, and the adventure all recall the excitement one feels in reading Deleuze and Guattari’s works and their “schizoanalytic” liberation of the unconscious. Michel Foucault in his preface to their book ANTI-OEDIPUS declared that it could be characterised as an “introduction to the non-fascist life”. This non-fascist formula of resistance and (self-)creation comes to life again in the pages of Miéville’s THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS. This paper argues that Miéville’s weird fantasy can be seen as a work of noetic estrangement, altering not only our cognitive premises but also our imaginative syntheses. Its weird ontology participates in a more general movement of overturning and immanentising Platonism in favour of an ontology of pluralist abundance.

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