Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
About
Two city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village during China's Cultural Revolution for "re-education" — hard labor, political study, and the erasure of everything they once knew. Then they meet the local tailor's daughter and discover a hidden cache of Western novels in Chinese translation: Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert. As they secretly devour these forbidden books and compete for the seamstress's affection, literature becomes their escape route — from the village, from their circumstances, and eventually from each other. Dai Sijie wrote this novel in French from memory and exile, and the prose carries the particular ache of someone describing a paradise they can never return to. The story is deceptively simple: two boys, a girl, a suitcase of books. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a novel about the power of stories to transform a life — and the cruelty of transformation itself.
