Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Author(s): Dai Sijie

Fiction

"In 1971 Mao's campaign against the intellectuals is at its height. Our narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of being the sons of doctors, have been sent to a remote mountain village to be 'reeducated'. The kind of education that takes place among the peasants of Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous, foggy paths, but the two seventeen-year-olds have a violin and their sense of humour to keep them going. Further distraction is provided by the attractive daughter of the local tailor, possessor of a particularly fine pair of feet. Their true re-education starts, however, when they discover a comrade's hidden stash of classics of great nineteenth-century Western literature - Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy and others, in Chinese translation. They need all their ingenuity to get their hands on the forbidden books, but when they do their lives are turned upside down. And not only their lives- after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, the Little Seamstress will never be the same again. Without betraying the truth of what happened, Dai Sijie transforms the bleak events of China's Cu

General Information

  • : 9780099286431
  • : Random House UK
  • : VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
  • : 0.13
  • : April 2002
  • : 198mm X 126mm
  • : books

Other Specifications

  • : Dai Sijie
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 843/.92
  • : very good

More About The Product

Shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2002.

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was himself 're-educated' between 1971 and 1974, and left China in 1984 for France, where he has lived and worked ever since. This, his first novel, was an overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000, became an immediate bestseller and won five prizes. Rights to the novel have been sold in twenty-five countries and it as been made into a film.