Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

Ce livre raconte le parcours de deux jeunes réactionnaires en rééducation en chine rouge, sous le pouvoir du président Mao. Ils font la connaissance de la fille du tailleur de la montagne, Le Phénix du Ciel. Cette fille, la Petite Tailleuse, est passionnée par les contes que lui raconte les jeunes garcons Luo et Dai. Ces deuz derniers ont pour objectif de cambrioler des livres interdits dans le but d'éduquer la Petite Tailleuse pour qu'elle ne soit plus une simple montagnarde.

"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" does exactly what this type of book should do. It offers us a brief window into a part of the world, and a style of life, of which we will never be able to encounter first hand. It allows to walk a few steps in the shoes of a different kind of citizen of life, and thus empathize with their experience. It also provides a moving allegory for the power of fiction, and lets us appreciate something that is so readily available to us, yet so rare for others. The escape of fiction allows for dreams, and is a powerful force.Being almost ignorant of the Chinese cultural re-education system, this book was educational historically as well. I had known of it in theory, but not details such as the banning of all books other than those written by Mao, or the process behind re-education. I do want to learn more about this chapter in history, of which the world is still feeling the repercussions.The book itself is gentle, with moving imagery and a quiet sense of humor. The characters in it do not rage against the political machine, but instead make do with what life has forced upon them. There is love, of course, because humans will love in the most desperate of circumstances. To highlight the playfulness of the book, my favorite scene is when the tailor, influenced by the hearing of Count of Monte Cristo, begins to dress the village in fanciful pirate clothes and nautical emblems.Charming all the way through, and small enough to be a quick read.

"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" is a sweet, short and whimsical little coming of age story. That it happens to be set during China's Cultural Revolution and revolves around sent-down educated youth is incidental, which is a refreshing change. One of the editorial reviews labels this a "moving, often wrenching novel"; that it is neither is what makes it so appealing. Dai Sijie's lovely novel is a departure from most the "scar literature" about the Cultural Revolution in so many refreshing ways. The genre is saturated by epic-length wallow fests, equal parts suffering, self-importance and appeal-to-Western-readers exotica. "Balzac" is simple, unpretentious, strait-forward and humorous. The tragic overtones of the time are mentioned passingly and straightforwardly, as through the eyes of a youth more concerned with his own affairs than of the nation convulsing around him. Yet its tragedy is so much more moving with such a sparing brush than those that linger morbidly to flesh out all the gory details. The story is told through the eyes of a sent-down youth and his bosom buddy Luo. They are typical teenagers, at once cocky and nervous, at first thrown in over their heads in the small village they are assigned to, but soon figuring things out well enough to manipulate the system, and usually get away with it. Much humor is made through the village headman's infatuation with Luo's alarm clock, the first such thing to ever be seen in the town, and how they use the villages blind trust in its accuracy to steal extra hours of morning sleep.The central characters are not paragons of virtue, and often downright unsympathetic, which makes the plot the more engaging and realistic. With teenage boy duplicity, they both vie to seduce the prettiest girl in the village, the seamstress of the title. Luo's talent for storytelling had won them the task of going to town to see movies and then come back and reenact them for the rest of the village, and first courts the seamstress with his movie tales.After a friend of theirs, another sent-down youth and the child of writers, grudgingly loans them a Balzac book, Luo discovers that French romanticism gets him further with the girl than Korean Communist propaganda. After much plotting, they steal their friend's secret suitcase of banned Western novels, leading to the book's central conflict: Luo's forbidden affair with the seamstress, and the trio's forbidden love affair with literature.In the average Cultural Revolution tale, these love affairs would end disastrously. Perhaps playfully alluding to the cliches of the genre, Dai foreshadows such a romantically tragic ending. What happens instead hilariously cements the book as a solidly realistic and cynical portrait of China and of human nature.It's interesting to note the disparity between the emigrant Chinese writers who went to France and who went to Anglophone countries. While most of the latter, apart from a few notable exceptions, are horrendous writers,

Lovely book. Except for two brief shifts in narrative viewpoint, the story is told in a very simple, almost naive way. But that simplicity hides great richness.The story is about the power of dreams, imagination, fables, and the dangers they bring. The Cultural Revolution had forced two teenagers, the narrator and his friend, to relocate to a tiny mountainside village. And though these two young men are hardly shining lamps of erudition and culture, they manage to excite the imagination of their neighbors. Their violin (poorly played) charms the headmaster into accepting them into the village. The headmaster becomes enthralled, almost hypnotized with a clock with a rooster on the face, and its hold over him helps the two boys cope with farmwork. When the headmaster discovers the two can retell movies skillfully, they are sent to the larger village down th mountain expressly to watch films and retell them when they return. These things help them endure the rigors of Mao's reeducation. The story creates for them a kind of tiny paradise. When they find (steal) a chest full of forbidden western classics, they are ecstatic. The stories are themselves dangerous, in Mao's paranoid, anti-intellectual, anti-western culture, where everyone was an informer and the crimes were not defined. But the stories are also dangerous for their exploration of the passions, for their power to excite the imagination, for their sheer craft and knowledge of the human heart. The narrator's friend begins to use Balzac's stories to woo a lovely seamstress. In the very briefest, most evocative possible way, Dai shows how the books bring hints of conflict and danger into this little village. The narrator finds he is jealous of his friend and the seamstress. More disturbingly, he finds he thinks of things as his and mine, where before he never thought to distinguish. Contrary to another reviewer, I find the story doesn't patronize or belittle the seamstress at all. In fact, that is one of the key ironies of the book, that the boy had tried to win her heart, and then make her a sophisticate, with Balzac, and had in fact succeeded. But the stories are the very thing that drive her away to make her own life in the city. They freed her, in fact. Contrary to a reviewer below, the story feels Chinese to me. It has that exuberant, slightly coarse humor and that feeling of localness, like everything is taking place in a minature landscape: mountain, fields, a town (the big one) that consists of two buildings.Dai himself endured "re-education," and it must have been a horrific experience. That he can write such a sunny, yet subtle and resonant work about the period is another proof of the power of literature and the imagination.

Aah, this is a real find. Here's a lovely story with haunting images that will stay with you. It's a story of oppression reminiscent of "Fahrenheit 451" but it also has some harrowing adventure. It is at once charming and startling as we are plunged into the horror of Mao's "re-education" plan for China. It's a love story, yes, but it's mostly about the love of words, the insatiable thirst for stories, entertainment, and escape of any kind, the enormous revolution your life can undertake when introduced to new ideas, old wisdom, and beautiful language. It's especially delightful for those of us who love Asian literature. This translation from the French is a bit awkward in places, but it still manages to transcend language barriers and relate the magic the author intended. Frankly, I was drawn to the book because the cover is so beautiful, and I love the small size. As a former designer of publications, I immediately appreciated the beauty of the package, including the truly lovely typeface. It's a complete experience. And nothing in the book is overdone. It's like dessert for the soul.