Title: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Author: Sijie Dai
Published: October 29, 2002
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 184
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.
In the early 1970s, two middle-class Chinese boys are sent to a rural mountain village to be “re-educated” by the wholesome peasant farmers. The boys know they are unlikely to ever complete their re-education and be permitted to return to their city and families, so are resigned to the dismal prospect of living in the village for the rest of their lives. The only bright spots come in the form of the daughter of the local tailor and a suitcase full of banned books.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a slim, fast-reading book, one that I enjoyed but probably a book that didn’t make too enormous of an impression on me. I do find it interesting that one of the biggest plot points in the book is translated fiction, and this book itself has been translated from the French. (Just kind of a cool little aside there.) This is also Dai Sijie’s debut novel, which is pretty impressive; I wonder if his other novels are equally worthwhile.
The only part of this novel I seriously didn’t like or understand was the three chapters/sections at the end told from a perspective other than the primary narrator’s. I didn’t understand what necessitated the shift, and actually found it to both pull me out of the story and confuse the plot and character development. However, that was the only true issue I had with the entire (albeit brief) book.
In any case, books about books are also a point of interest for me, especially when it’s a book like this one, which deals with subjects and a time period so completely foreign to me. The situation that Dai’s protagonists find themselves in is so hopelessly bleak, yet the narration itself is rather upbeat and cheerful—only occasionally does the darkness break through. By and large, the author’s prose is light and, though sparing, it’s elegant and fluid. I imagine that it would be even better in French, of course. So, with all that added up, I think Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was a book that found the ability to tell a smart, pleasing novel about literature and its powers of inspiration and empowerment, in spite of impossible circumstances.
