Four-Eyes is a city youth who is being re-educated in a village near that of Luo and the narrator. Though he is initially friendly with them, he is stingy about sharing the books that he keeps in a locked suitcase, and later reveals that does not care much for them at all. Four-Eyes's mother is an elegant, worldly poet whose work is famous in her home province. She arrives on the mountain to fetch her son. The police officer from Yong Jing was fired for sleeping with two women.
The narrator unsuccessfully asks him for advice about procuring an abortion for the Seamstress. The narrator tries to approach him for advice about the Seamstress's abortion, but finds him dying of cancer.
The middle-aged gynecologist from Yong Jing agrees to perform the Little Seamstress's abortion after the narrator promise to give him a Balzac novel as payment. Though Chairman Mao never directly appears in the novel, his influence is everywhere. As the head of both the government and the Communist Party, Mao has established the authoritarian principles of the Cultural Revolution.
Four elderly sorceresses who live near Yong Jing are recruited to both save Luo from malaria and later to perform an exorcism before Four-Eyes's goodbye banquet. The elderly miller lives near the narrator and Luo's village, and teaches them songs that they give to Four-Eyes, hoping to procure books in exchange.
The book moves too quickly over much of this, offering a few episodes to focus on and skipping over long periods of admittedly probably very dreary time. Still, it offers a good glimpse of China during the Cultural Revolution, and of the power of literature and the deep loathing for a system and people who keep literature out of the hands of readers.
A fine little read. Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. Contents: Main. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Canada. Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise - Canada. Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise - France. Average rating 3. Rating details. Sort order. Start your review of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Mar 30, Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it.
Their terms are indefinite because their parents, doctors and dentists, were considered bourgeois enemies of the people. The book is translated from the French. All the universities were closed and all boys and girls who had graduated from high school were sent off. Math, physics and chemistry were dropped from the school curriculum and replaced by agricultural and industrial texts. The work the boys do is brutal farm work, done by all the peasants in this village.
They are human pack animals carrying buckets of human and animal excrement up hills to fertilize fields; plowing in mud behind water buffalo; working naked on their hands and knees in a coal mine. They are in an isolated village so lost in time that people are barefoot and there are no doctors or dentists; But there is a gleam of hope. The narrator thinks that Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland was particularly life-changing for him. With the brutal lives of the peasants as background, the real theme is the enlightenment that comes from reading and how it can change lives.
View all 22 comments. May 26, Sofia rated it did not like it Shelves: failed-romance , historical-fiction , idek-anymore-guys , le-sigh , lol-what-female-characters , love-geometry , problematic , i-am-disgusted , a-man-saves-the-day , look-at-the-idiot.
This is a story of hypocrisy and objectification. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a book about I thought it would be about music. It's not. I thought it would be about literature. It's about two immature boys and their love for a girl named Little Seamstress. They found some books along the way and managed to make them offensive, but that was mostly a side plot.
I think the message is supposed to be that a love for literature can open your eyes to different wor This is a story of hypocrisy and objectification. I think the message is supposed to be that a love for literature can open your eyes to different worlds. But it was done very badly. First of all, this was somehow twisted and became problematic. Little Seamstress hadn't yet read Western literature, so the two boys kept talking about her like she was a different species of human.
Like she was so much less than they were, just a "wild mountain girl" and a "savage. The Little Seamstress was objectified constantly.
Does she actually have a personality? No one knows. She is just a pair of pretty almond-shaped bright eyes like sTaRs and a nice face. She's the only important female character, too. Come on. This is why I try to stay away from older books by men. There was mansplaining, of course.
Did you think there wouldn't be? Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is so obviously written by a man. The writing was supposed to be poetic, but it fell short. The dialogue was so unnatural that it made me cringe. One character was written as a great storyteller, but everything he said felt like scripted dialogue. However, this might just be a translation issue. It makes me feel so bad to rate a book one star when I'm just getting started.
Oh, well. View all 13 comments. Oct 19, Will Byrnes rated it really liked it. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. One plays a violin. The other has a gift for telling stories. They endure the labors assigned by the opium growers who rule the area, and are desperate for any sort of intellectual stimulation.
The local chief assigns them to travel two days to the nearest town in which films are shown, then report back to the town the entirety of the films. There is another reclamation project in the town, Four Eyes. He has a hidden trove of books, and when they do him a service he allows them to borrow a novel by Balzac. This is manna from heaven for them and they plan how they might acquire more books from Four Eyes. The Little Seamstress of the title is a beautiful young woman, who becomes lover to one of the young men both are in their late teens.
She is the uneducated daughter of a local tailor, a man of some status in this area. They share their tale of Balzac with her. Spoiler alert here — do not read further if you want to learn plot details for yourself. Little Seamstress becomes pregnant. While the responsible boy is away on town business the friend takes her to the nearest town to help her get an abortion. He would like nothing more than to woo her for himself, but, ultimately, his kindness goes unrewarded, as, having gotten a sense, even if at one remove, that there is a world beyond her little village, the Little Seamstress leaves to seek her fortune in the big city.
The boys are left high and dry. The final few chapters are told from alternating points of view, the Seamstress, the old miller, the younger lad.
It is a bit jarring, if illuminating. The story has a beauty to it that bears some close inspection. I am certain that I could dissect the many details of the story for symbolic payload. I have not done that. I get the feeling though that there is richness there beyond the surface simplicity of the tale. This is a quick and pretty read, and is heartily recommended.
View all 6 comments. Oct 27, J. A charming book, written with astute quickness, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is both erudite and approachable. It is full of details that absolutely make the scenes pop with vividness, but it does not dawdle over what is not necessary. It is a story with a point. Which is where this book falls apart. Despite its captivation of the reader, its quick pace, its interesting plot, this short novel begins to come apart when perspectives are suddenly shifted why?
I think that the problem is that this book gives great argument against the very thing that it lauds, only it does not seem to realize it. It is a book so enraptured in its cute story, its nice little package, that it fails to truly consider what it is saying. Alas, the ending is something of a disappointment that tempers the enthusiastic praise I can otherwise heap on it.
Don't expect much from this little book, despite its great efforts to convince you there is something to expect, and you shall enjoy it as you blaze through the pages. Set aside a few hours to read this one non-stop, and schedule something immediately afterward to wash the taste of the ending away. View all 15 comments. Mar 07, Emilie rated it liked it. On its surface, this book has all the ingredients for a really interesting read: a fascinating historical period, potentially interesting characters, and the frequently quite compelling topic of the use or function of literature within literature.
Unfortunately, I felt like Sijie failed to live up to the greatness of his own project. The Cultural Revolution is supposedly the force that propels this story forward. It is, after all, the reason for which the main character and his best friend Luo a On its surface, this book has all the ingredients for a really interesting read: a fascinating historical period, potentially interesting characters, and the frequently quite compelling topic of the use or function of literature within literature.
It is, after all, the reason for which the main character and his best friend Luo are sent to the countryside for their re-education; however, I get the feeling that none of this could actually have happened during the Cultural Revolution, which presents an interesting dilemma and calls the entire book into question. The Revolution, the Communist Party and their respective trappings are sometimes present, but often conspicuously absent from the story, giving the characters a convenient freedom when it is needed and the story a sort of lamely suspenseful tone when things seem to be lagging a bit.
In the end, it seems like the Cultural Revolution and the re-education process are just sort of there to make the story interesting, in spite of the seminal role that they should be playing in the text.
One gets the impression that perhaps Sijie took on a bit too much. The characters and story are also woefully underdeveloped. I read the book over the course of one day in part because it was a quick read that kept me vaguely interested, but also because the novel reads like a half fleshed-out outline of a future project.
There is a lack of detail and development that I found particularly bothersome, especially as I felt like it would have been particularly interesting if the novelist had attempted to pay homage to the authors that his two young heroes admire.
Unfortunately, Sijie's writing was far too inferior to do such a thing. Furthermore, he often fails to maintain a consistent tone, which vacillates between casual and lofty without any real reason for a switch. I've rated this book three stars; in spite of my review, I did still enjoy it to a certain degree. Enough, obviously, to plow through it in a day.
Would I read it again? Would I recommend it to anyone? Probably not. Was it decent? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, yeah, it was decent. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't say that it was a good book by any means. To be honest, I was suspicious of anything carrying the label 'best-seller' prior to picking this one up. I am now even more leery of that qualification. View all 8 comments. Jun 22, Vanessa rated it really liked it. Sweet charming story with a fable quality. The story revolves around a part of history that I feel somewhat ignorant about, the story takes place during the Chinese cultural revolution a time in history where communism was a means to suppress and take away individuality.
Life is controlled under the regime of Mao Zedong chairman of the Chinese communist party and restrictions take place, where revolutionary literature is forbidden and higher learning is discouraged, a time when boys where taken Sweet charming story with a fable quality.
Life is controlled under the regime of Mao Zedong chairman of the Chinese communist party and restrictions take place, where revolutionary literature is forbidden and higher learning is discouraged, a time when boys where taken away from their towns and then placed into primitive little villages with the sole purpose of reeducation.
The main characters the two boys in this book find a surprising escape from their harsh daily activities when they stumble upon a suitcase full of forbidden works of western fiction and their whole world suddenly opens up. I love the simplicity of this story and the quirky narrative with lots of traditional Chinese elements and traditions sprinkled in, that I felt instantly enchanted by it.
Although the story is simple the message is a strong one, it shows the transformative power of books and literature and how it has the ability to change and provoke thoughts and thinking. I love how the ending ties the little Chinese seamstress to the main theme of the book and I adored the ending which left me feeling uplifted and joyous. View all 10 comments. Jun 30, Petra is looking forward to getting off the rock rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , reviewed.
This is a gentle, magical book, quite unlike any other I have ever read. The author really gets into the minds of the two boys and the seamstress and the tiny, colourful life they create together despite the poverty of mountain village and the oppression of the Cultural Revolution.
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As an only child, Dai would've been excused from Mao's "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside" program, which sought to "re-educate" young students by sending them to work and learn from the rural peasants. Dai chose to participate, however, and he cites the allure of rigorous training as his reasoning.
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