Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

There was a legendary writer in the Hungarian literary world, István Örkény, who beyond doubt is one of the finest absurdist (writer of absurd prose) in the world. He wrote a collection of short stories - really, really short ones, so much so that the title of this legendary book is One Minute Stories (available in English as well). One of the most beautiful pieces is about the magic of literature - although the original Hungarian title is "Ballad about the Power of Poetry" (check it out here -

There was a legendary writer in the Hungarian literary world, István Örkény, who beyond doubt is one of the finest absurdist (writer of absurd prose) in the world. He wrote a collection of short stories - really, really short ones, so much so that the title of this legendary book is One Minute Stories (available in English as well). One of the most beautiful pieces is about the magic of literature - although the original Hungarian title is "Ballad about the Power of Poetry" (check it out here - pdf file - or here).

That's exactly was the first thought that occured to me while I was reading Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, a short literary allegory about... well, the power of literature.

Although the environment and the events are anything but allegoric. During Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution two teenagers - being sons of well known and succesful doctors and as such, parts of the hatred intelligentsia - are declared enemies of the states and sent to a remote mountain village for "re-education". They are surrounded by unbelievably poor and ignorant peasants (ex-opium growers turned into Mao-communists) and their fate is about to be finally and hopelessly doomed when they come across a bunch of classical European literature (like Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo, and so forth). Through the novels a whole new world reveals itself to them and to a beautiful local girlfriend of one of the boys (the little Chinese seamstress). The power of literature affects not just the boys but changes the life of the girl for ever: Dai Sijie's story is a Pygmalion story as well - where the role of Pygmalion is equally divided between the boys and the members of the European classical canon.

The most intriguing features of the book is its humor and its language: it is written in a very exact, precise, spare, "outsider" prose most of the time that adds to an interesting dichotomy: the narrator, who is actually one of the boys (presumably Dai Sijie himself or a close alter ego of his), is of course an "insider" but with this style he manages to keep some elegant distance from the text (and the events) as well and that goes to the authencity of the novel.

That being said, Sijie unfortunatelly let it loose in the end: the sentences are roaming around a bit too much (think of the embedded story of the preacher-turned-streetsweeper of which function seems to be quite puzzling), and then there are the "audience intervenes" parts (The Old Miller's story, Luo's Story and The Little Seamstress's Story), that tells me Sijie was not able to solve a writing-technique problem - namely, to provide some information on the characters that the narrator himself simply could not have. (Ouch.)

All and all it is an authentic, intelligent, quietly humorous Bildungsroman, a certain L'Éducation sentimentale if you like, but mainly and most importantly it is a deeply honest salute to the power of literature, that can give us all hope and faith, what's more, it can be the only straw that keeps us alive.