There’s so much absurd beauty among the fauna in this story of surrealist art come to life in Nazi-occupied France ... The book’s wonderful strangeness is heightened by Miéville’s revelation of his weirdest weirdnesses second- and third-hand ... The finale of The Last Days of New Paris is both moving and disturbingly timely.
...really a short novel with two distinct plot lines, and, paradoxically, it's both a fine introduction to his unique imagination and a marked departure from his earlier work ... Miéville is less concerned with the mechanics of alternate history than with the opportunity it provides to explore his knowledgeable fascination with the Surrealist movement ... The result is a novel both unhinged and utterly compelling, a kind of guerrilla warfare waged by art itself, combining both meticulous historical research and Miéville's unparalleled inventiveness.
This is a fun scenario, and Miéville grounds his story in an intricate web of real world references, which are explained at length in endnotes. But as a work of fiction the novel remains flat...The narrative proceeds artificially from crisis to crisis, without an impression of cause and effect. It often seems that things happen just so Miéville can show off another bit of art historical lore ... The biggest problem with The Last Days of New Paris is that for a book about surrealism, it fails to feel surreal ... [It] comes across as an elaborate thought experiment, rather than a compelling fiction.
Miéville is at his best when he’s imagining things like the politics behind the rise of the diabolical Nazi church. The book hums when he’s managing a handful of huge variables at the same time ... As a formulaic romp, The Last Days of New Paris is fun and smart. While other authors tack on their characters’ political ideologies, Miéville makes them matter. But by manifesting the concepts, he picks up a greater burden. Sometimes the ideas threaten to burst the seams on the form.
Will it help you going into Last Days if you've got a master's-level education in art history with a focus on French Surrealism? Maybe. I don't and I loved the vicious, weird little thing anyway ... Last Days is Miéville's war story. It is beautiful, stunningly realized, mind-bendingly bizarre.
Alternate history via Miéville’s exemplary imagination creates an ideal forum to consider fascism and art, or fascism versus art, as the case may be ... Overall The Last Days of New Paris certainly fun. There’s a whimsy to the bestiary of wolf-tables and wailing baby heads. But one should definitely read the footnotes alongside the story.
The bestiary of surrealist “manifs,” or manifestations, that Miéville parades before us is dazzling. In the Seine there are sharks with canoe-seats for backs. There are wolf-tables, and a giant baby’s face emerging from the ground ... It is quite a feat to narrate all this in a terse, naturalistic style that is neither overtly silly nor po-faced. The prose reserves its right to outbreaks of sly wit ... overall the effect is exhilaratingly precise and serious, as though Albert Camus had rewritten Raiders of the Lost Ark. What there isn’t much of is dramatic suspense, since, when things get hairy, the characters reveal hitherto unsuspected magical powers ... the author and the reader are well aware by the book’s end of how this intense, scholarly fantasy speaks to our age as well.
This concern with the political in general and the relationship between art and politics in particular is conspicuous in The Last Days of New Paris, where it receives a singularly subtle treatment ... weaves two narratives together – one set in a recognizable France of 1941 and the other in an unrecognizable Paris of 1950 — and populates each with a mix of real and fictional people, but it does not invite one to ruminate on the possible consequences...neither a call for resistance nor a naïve allegory of art’s revolutionary power ...an extraordinarily original work that foregrounds Miéville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation ... As such, The Last Days of New Paris calls for a revolt in art rather than a revolt in politics, for integrating politics into art rather than employing art as a means to political ends.
[Mieville] dices up and disposes of narrative continuity with the flair of a collage artist. The resulting portrait of a city outside of time entices and rewards readers, even as it rebuffs traditional ideas about how stories should be told ... At once old-fashioned and unconventional, Miéville’s novel transcends expectations of modernism raised by its recent publication.
Unfortunately, [the] colorful manifestations are often described dispassionately, and in the end not matched by an engaging story ... Told fairly conventionally in alternating chapters of Thibault’s 1950 and the France of 1941, this book feels too easy, too safe, too paint-by-numbers (though brightly painted, in high surrealist style) for someone of Miéville’s talents and imagination ... he’s written a good-enough book when we’ve come to expect true greatness. There’s no music to it.
In some ways, The Last Days of New Paris, as literary art, does not seem to me among the author’s strongest works. Miéville, in his previous books, has created an impressive gallery of strongly individuated characters, but here his powers of characterization are exercised less memorably than usual. ... As occasionally happens in the Miéville oeuvre, the author’s powers of narrative invention run a bit ahead of his powers of narrative structuration, and the reader may have unnecessary difficulty following the action ... The Last Days of New Paris would have been more successful in a more visual medium, as a graphic novel, or even as a film, rather than as a work of prose fiction ... Perhaps the greatest appeal of the volume as we have it is as a kind of allegory of the author’s longstanding relationship with Surrealism.
