[.ca] Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (ISBN 1587244764)

entertaining:
fast, easy read. Liked the characters, made you think, laugh, and smile. Overall an enjoyable read.

Worth the reading!:
This was a very interesting novel from a literary standpoint (and from the standpoint of a western reader peeking into a time and place that are quite foreign to them). Every character has a nickname "Four Eyes," "the Seamstress," etc., except for the narrator's friend/roommate. He is the only one granted a name. Steinbeck once said of his character 'Curly's wife' from "Of Mice and Men" that he didn't give her a name like everyone else because she was just a literary mechanism...a means to an end. In the Chinese Seamstress, I think it's just the opposite, the character who gets the name is the mechanism through which the narrator, the seamstress and the reader explores the surroundings and events of rural China during this Cultural Revolution. In all, the book can be enjoyed on many different levels, if one bothers to dig deeply enough. Most casual readers, however, may not want to put forth the effort.

Worth reading...:
It took a little time for me to warm up to this novel but I'm glad I did. Like many authors, whose first language is not English, Dai Sijie wrote in very simple and direct language that appealed to me. Luo and his friend are sent to a village for re-education where they meet the seamstress. They think she is perfection except she is not as educated as they so the embark on a journey to educate her with a stolen bag of books. The irony of the story is only seen at the end when she leaves her village in order to go to the city, leaving behind her aged father and both the boys.

Re-education for dummies:
I cannot imagine a world where simply reading is a crime. I cannot imagine it!! But it happens, or so I am told. This is the story of a few urban teenagers in China, circa 1970, who have been sent to a mountain to be re-educated. The story opens with the locals inspecting a violin and declaring it a bourgeois toy. Only the playing of "Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao" saves the violin from the flames. The sheer ludicrousness of many of the situations in the book are laughable, but at the same time, have a ring of "crap like this REALLY HAPPENED" to make the reader stop in her laughter and just shake her head. There is also a love story, buried in here. It's not a happy ending, but the little seamstress does feature prominently as a star in a romance. Though I know this is a translation, it is an excellent one, and reads very smoothly. The biggest jumps are in cultural translations. I enjoyed this fast read. The pictures drawn were exquisite, and the text has pulled me back to some classics I haven't read for a while. So, now, it's off to read some Count of Monte Cristo... (*)>

Abrupt Ending:
This book is focused on the lives of two teenage boys living in China. During a major cultural revolution in which the educated elite are seen as enemies, having parents who are doctors and dentists is a major disadvantage. Such is the case for the narrator and his best friend, Luo. The two boys are taken from their families and sent to live in a tiny village, where they are "re-educated," meaning that they are forced to work on the farms, haul heavy bundles, and enter a tiny and terrifying coal mine. Because of the extent of their parents' danger to authority, Luo and the narrator expect they will be exiled to this village for a very long time, and they try to find ways to make their miserable time there more bearable. Luo falls in love with a girl--the daughter of the local tailor. Soon he is spending much of his time sneaking off to be with the little seamstress. Still, these young men need more in their lives. When they find out that another boy being re-educated nearby has a secret stash of forbidden literature, they are desperate to get their hands on it. I really enjoyed much of this story. I liked the narrator, and I especially liked the ways in which he and his friend Luo interacted. They were able to make the best of their situation without getting beaten down, and I appreciated that they used great literature to buoy themselves up through difficult times. I suppose I just expected more of an ending to this story. I felt like I was left hanging, not knowing what the next step for the narrator and Luo would be, and not really getting to explore Luo's or the seamstress' feelings. I felt as though we were leaving the story at a crucial point, and I was cheated out of a true resolution.