My Last Empress is a very weird book. It's true that I like weird books, but I actually didn't enjoy this one. The writing is beautiful but the sex scenes are hokey - like a romance novel. Da Chen obviously (and shamelessly) borrowed from Nabokov, calling his heroine a nymphet countless times. I didn't appreciate that. I didn't buy the love story. Would not recommend. ( )

I always find it hard to read books with a protagonist I don’t particularly like. Samuel Pickens is perverted and obsessed with Anabelle, who seems more like a homage to the literary nymphets who have gone before her than a real person. Of course, the story is told in first person by Samuel himself, who is molesting mannequins while fantasizing about Annabelle’s ghost – like Humbert Humbert’s Dolores she is not a real person to him.

Snark Alert: I kept feeling like I had read this book before, right down to all the butterfly allusions. It seemed like the real story was about the rise and fall of Samuel’s penis. (oh dear, I hate puns)
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An odd story; one driven by past love in search of that transcendent experience in the body that is supposed to be inhabited by the past love. The spirit happens to inhabit a body in decadent China, at the highest level of decadence. Interesting that Pickens finds himself perfectly at home, lust and power all around him, he never figures it out. Pickens can't get out of his own search for his past love, even when it is so apparent that the physical world is not going to cooperate. He doesn't find himself and redeem his past love. He wallows in self-pity without recovering. Too bad. I was hoping for conquering heroism, but Pickens slinks away.

I did not care for Da Chen's My Last Empress. There was no plot and the author used many oddball descriptions of sex organs and the sex act itself.

The main character is Samuel Pickens. He is a classic pedophile, falling in love with a young Anabelle. Anabelle dies suddenly and Pickens accepts a position to tutor a young Chinese emporer. Amazingly, the emperor's 4th wife is Anabelle's daughter. Pickens is obsessed with Anabelle and molests her ghost as well as mannequins that remind him of her. He constantly sees butterflies but sometimes think that they are ghosts. Pickens obviously suffers from a mental illness as he is unable to determine what is real and what is an illusion.

Da Chen got rave reviews for his earlier novels so I don't know what happened here. I would rate My Last Empress -10. ( )