Bewitching Books (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
Date:	12/11/06 (1596 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: short, profound, occasionally funny

Disadvantages: ending a bit too short

Don’t judge a book by its title! When Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress was published in 2000, I wasn’t attracted, I know very little about French literature and to link this French author of the 19th century to a Chinese Seamstress of Mao’s China seemed a bit too far-fetched to me. Yet when an acquaintance whose literary taste I trust recommended the book last month I gave it a go.

Two 17-and-18-vear-old boys are sent from the city into a village for re-education, the year is 1971 and the Cultural Revolution still in full swing. They aren’t intellectuals, they only attended middle school where the only subjects were the basics of industry and agriculture, but their parents, physicians, are considered enemies of the people and the sons have to pay for this. Their work load includes carrying buckets of excrements up steep mountain paths onto the fields as manure, working in a coal mine or ploughing the rice pads with water buffalos. How long this ordeal is going to last they don’t know, what they do know is that only three out of thousand youths return.

The most beautiful girl of the whole area is the Little Seamstress, the only daughter of the tailor, it doesn’t take long for her and Luo, the narrator’s friend, to become lovers, a dangerous enterprise in a society in which marriage under the age of twenty-five is illegal, having a child before marrying absolutely out of the question and abortion also against the law. The Little Seamstress (neither she nor the narrator ever have a name) is funny, clever and can read a little, but Luo regards her as uncivilised, he‘d like to change that.

Not far from the friends‘ village lives Four Eyes, another city boy sent to the countryside for re-education, when the friends help him in an emergency he gives them a novel by Balzac, somehow he’s managed to smuggle a whole suitcase full of books into his exile. The two friends devour it and Luo, a born story-teller, starts civilising his girl-friend by telling her the content of the novel. “With these books I shall transform The Little Seamstress. She’ll never be a simple mountain girl again.”

The novel, Dai Sijie’s debut, was an immediate international success, it spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Why would people suddenly be interested in the adventures of two barely educated Chinese boys?

Although the novel is very short with 172 pages, it contains a lot of themes. Let me tell you what I’ve found: for once there’s the vivid description of a part of China I know nothing about, I can imagine the landscape, the flora and fauna, when the two friends walk up and down the narrow paths in the Phoenix mountains, I become dizzy with them.

The two boys are so young and innocent, not only in the field of love and sex, they know absolutely nothing about life, I find a coming-of age story here, besides that, the novel is also an ode to friendship and a heart-warming, romantic love story. Luo’s wish to civilise his girl-friend is an ironic parallel of his own re-education which he resents bitterly, why should the girl be happy about his educating her?

The major theme is, of course, the role of literature, the two boys have at least sampled the pleasures the immersion in a book can bring before they were sent away, so when they’re deprived of books they suffer. The narrator is so enraptured by the novel by Balzac that he feels he has to copy a part of it, when he can’t find a sheet of paper, he writes into the inside of his sheepskin coat! The idea to have the words of the beloved author near his body make him happy. The illiterate villagers don’t miss literature because they don’t know it but when the boys start telling them what they’ve read, they become hooked.

Why do stories fascinate at all? Well, they’ve always fascinated people from the time our ancestors were crouching round the fireplace listening to real or imagined adventures with mammoths and saber toothed tigers, the love for words, language, literature is innate to the human species. For the two boys and The Little Seamstress the literature they encounter answers their individual needs, what these are and where these encounter lead to is interesting and also surprising to read.

Then there’s the political aspect, the author Dai Sijie was born in 1954 and was himself re-educated between 1971 and 1974, so we can be sure that what we learn about this period in the recent history of China is correct. I must confess that this aspect of the novel touches me deeply, other readers may react differently. I haven’t been to China but I know that I know more about the country than some of the people that have and who I’ve spoken to. In the 1970s I was a member of the German-Chinese Friendship Organisation, I read every book about China I could get, I listened to lectures delivered by people who had lived in China, marched with Mao and had first-hand experience of the revolution. The revolution was considered a good thing then, necessary to end the miserable living conditions of the people but as it goes with revolutions - enough examples can be studied in recent history - it soon deteriorated and the Cultural Revolution led by Mao’s wife didn’t develop the new society but threw it back and cost a lot of lives. Now we know that we fell for the clever propaganda that was concocted for the world outside, a book like Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress couldn’t have been written then, pity, because it would have opened the eyes of many well-meaning supporters.

Something about the style: under the title is written: translated by Ina Rilke, I’ve searched the net but couldn’t find the answer if the author wrote the novel in Chinese or in French, from 1984 he’s been living in France. I assume that he wrote it in French, anyway, the translation reads well. The style is simple, the narrator tells us the story from the viewpoint of a grown-up, occasionally he inserts remarks like, “Looking back . . .” or “I’ll never forget . . .”, I miss an exact indication how old the narrator is and where he is when he tells us the story of his youth, I’d also have liked some sentences at the end rounding off the story.

The novel is not without humour, it’s not of the lol variety, though. Right at the beginning the villagers look at the narrator’s violin, they can’t make head or tail of the thingy. When they learn that music can be made with it, that he can play songs they demand to hear something. The problem is that he can only play a sonata by Mozart. Mozart Who? Luo saves the situation by telling them that his friend is going to play a song called Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao. Now, if that isn’t funny!

Vintage
First published in 2000
172 pages
Cover price 6.99 GBP

Summary: The adventures of two Chinese youths in Maoist China.