Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel | Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel | Dai Sijie | A MUST for book lovers..

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Balzac and the Lit...

	Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel Dai Sijie Anchor, 2002 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 220 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a sparkling tale

I read this novel on an airplane flying home from China. It was captivating. Probably because all that I had just seen, but more because it's a wonderful tale---well written, mesmerizing, descriptive, and touching. It's a glimpse into the cultural revolution--written by an author who experienced it. I loved the story and recommend it to everyone. It's a story you will not soon forget. Sometime after reading the book, I read more about the Cultural Revolution and found that the author's descriptions of the boys' journey to the village where they worked was a very accurate one---and described an experience that many young Chinese lived through during the Cultural Revolution.

I enjoy books like this one--books which transport the reader to another place and time and tell a story through which the reader can experience something that others have lived through.

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A MUST for book lovers..

Set during the re-education of the Chinese well to do, this little novel is breath taking. Not the most lyrical, as it has been translated and re-released, but the message of the story is profound.

As books have been banned, what is the price to find and have access to forbidden books? As our main characters dream of the lives they once had and the world that is waiting for them, their obsession and appreciation of the written word is stunning. The dreams that it unlocks, and the spell that literature weaves on those who are denined it unravels in a most beautiful and interesting way.

The book itself is a treasure, with beautifully printed jacket pages and a grippping cover photography..... this book is simple and short, but will leave you with a lot to talk about once it is finished. I bought this on Amazon as it was recommended to me due to other books I have rated highly- and I am so glad that I did. It is a rare and great find, in a small and simple way.

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The power (and failings) of fiction

There is no need to repeat the many praiseworthy qualities of this book. It is a beautiful printing of a straightforward and compact narrative that illustrates at first hand the process of "re-education" of the children of the Chinese educated classes under Chairman Mao in the 1970s. The two young heroes of this novel are sent to a remote mountain village to perform hard labor, but worse than any physical privation is the total absence of books, storytelling, fiction, the stuff of romance. One of the boys makes an impression on the villagers as a storyteller, but the transformative event is when they stumble upon a cache of contraband French novels smuggled in by a young man in another village. The first book, a translation of a novel by Balzac, changes their lives. Through them, it also changes the life of the little seamstress of the title, a beautiful girl whom each loves in his own way, and who is inspired by their imagination to nurture visions of her own.

So far so good. This is a compelling idea charmingly told, and surely worth at least four stars, whether as a window on a particular time or as fable. But that ambiguity is just the problem. Much of the interest in the book comes from its authenticity, the fact that the author himself underwent such a "re-education" between 1971 and 1974. And the first part of the book is a fine record of his experience and that of thousands like him. But once the element of fiction comes in, much of that harsh reality evaporates. The young men, who once were able to visit the next village only under exceptional circumstances, now seem to slip over their almost daily, and have time left over for leisurely swims in a convenient pool. Even getting to the distant town seems little obstacle. Descriptions of hardships such as carrying slopping buckets of excrement up a steep mountainside give way to comic episodes such as the improvised drilling of one of the village headman's teeth. It is as though, once fiction enters the picture, all of life becomes a fiction. But the power of the story is that of a light shining in darkness; once lose the dark, and even the pursuit of the light becomes trivial and self-indulgent.

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Left me feeling empty ...

I felt this novel was quite a bit over-rated. Although the concept is interesting and different (i.e., the re-education of the city academic boys in Mao Zedung's communist regime), the story was a bit flat. I have a feeling something must have been lost in the translation. Despite being so short, I had to force myself to get back into this novel. I guess I just found it mediocre, a bit boring and really, nothing special. There was nothing awful about it; but nothing great either.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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