Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress in Read a book from each country

Jun 29, 2012 Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship rated it liked it

Shelves: china, 2-stars-and-a-half, historical-fiction, read-in-translation, books-about-books

This is an entertaining and very brief novella, which nevertheless manages to be disappointing in its characterization and its cramped worldview.

The unnamed narrator and his best friend, Luo, are Chinese city boys sent to a remote mountain for "re-education" in the early 1970s. While there, they pursue a local seamstress and a suitcase full of banned Western (mostly French) classics. The plot is mostly entertaining: what reader can resist a protagonist's quest to read books, complete with weird This is an entertaining and very brief novella, which nevertheless manages to be disappointing in its characterization and its cramped worldview.

The unnamed narrator and his best friend, Luo, are Chinese city boys sent to a remote mountain for "re-education" in the early 1970s. While there, they pursue a local seamstress and a suitcase full of banned Western (mostly French) classics. The plot is mostly entertaining: what reader can resist a protagonist's quest to read books, complete with weird hijinks and adventures? I'm not into French literature, but this book did convince me to look into some of Balzac's work.

However, the plot doesn't always come together or make much sense. We're to understand that the boys have been sent to this mountain to do manual labor, and at the beginning of the book their work dominates their lives, but it quickly falls by the wayside as the plot requires, and they're able to take off work all day every day to visit the "Little Seamstress" without anyone apparently noticing or caring. At one point the narrator tells us that he and Luo were "physically and especially mentally" marked for life by their short stint in the mines.... but doesn't say how, and never mentions it again. And the end suffers from bizarre, unmotivated point-of-view shifts.

The characterization is a mixed bag, and perhaps suffers from the fact that the novel is semi-autobiographical. The narrator and Luo are decently well-drawn for such a short book. On the other hand, despite her prominence in the story, the nameless "Little Seamstress" never comes together as a real person, appearing only as an object of male desire. And everyone else who lives on the mountain--the "peasants"--are just peasants, whose role in the book is to be ignorant and primitive and awed by boys' storytelling abilities and by their "advanced technology," like violins and clocks.

Similarly, the historical aspect feels one-sided and simplified. From this book, you might think Mao's forcing a bunch of privileged city kids to go live in the country and do manual labor with ignorant peasants (horror of horrors!) was the worst atrocity in recent Chinese history. Sijie doesn't attempt to put either the protagonist's personal experience or re-education generally in any kind of context, and as far as I can tell the only thing he learned from his own experience is that he hates Communism. Not an unpopular position when writing for a Western audience, but I would've liked to see some greater understanding, some generosity of spirit, some nuance that just wasn't there.

On the positive side, the sense of place is very strong: I could just see this mountain, and if there's a movie version I'd watch it in a heartbeat; the visuals would be stunning. And the translation (from French) is seamless, such that I likely wouldn't have realized it was a translation had the cover not informed me.

All-in-all, a bit annoying, but there's a decent enough story and it's a short, very fast read. Still, not something I'm likely to recommend to others. ...more

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