In
this issue:
Books
by Eileen
Frost
"Balzac and the
Little Chinese Seamstress" is the recipient of five literary
prizes and a now a film soon to be released. It's been called
a testimony to "the power of art to enlarge our imaginations,
no matter what the circumstances."
And
Consider This
by Eileen
Frost
"The Fig Eater."
Jody Shield's intriguing first novel is eerie, bizarre, and elegant,
bringing us inside the Vienna of the Habsburgs just before the
First World War.
Books
Balzac and the Little
Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie
Alfred A. Knopf,
2001
A suitcase full of
books is the treasure at the center of this wonderful, funny,
ironic first novel. It takes place near the border of Tibet, in
faraway Sichuan, China. During the worst excesses of the Cultural
Revolution in China, two high school boys are sent for re-education
to a remote village on Phoenix Mountain, "guinea pigs in this
grand human experiment." One carries with him his violin, but
otherwise they have nothing but their wits and the clothes they
are wearing. Housed in squalid quarters, they work to exhaustion
each day among the peasants, in the coal mines or carrying buckets
of excrement up and down steep and dangerous mountain paths. What
could be more dreary?
Fortunately, they have
the consolation of their close friendship and that of a local
girl, a beautiful Little Seamstress. The boys also turn out to
be natural storytellers, with quick wit and lots of imagination.
Luo is "able to electrify an audience … even when overcome by
a violent bout of malaria."(!) When village leaders get a whiff
of their stories, they are mesmerized. The boys re-tell movies
they've seen and dredge from their memories tales to embellish
and pass on to the villagers. Like Homer's Greece, rural China
is truly a media-poor setting, where storytelling thrives.
Then, the boys happen
on an "elegant suitcase [that] gave off a whiff of civilisation."
Hidden in it is "a stash of forbidden books [with] mysterious
and exotic names evoking unknown worlds." In return for a large
favor to the suitcase's owner, the boys are grudgingly given a
Balzac novel. Later they get their hands on the rest of the books
and stop going to work just to read.
One of them falls in
love with the little Chinese seamstress. He decides to read Balzac
aloud to her and "transform the Little Seamstress. She'll never
be a simple mountain girl again." Such is the power of fine literature
that it subtly transforms them all, with unforeseen consequences.
Published first in
France, this novel was translated into English by Ina Rilke. The
author, Dai Sijie, a well known Chinese filmmaker who was himself
"re-educated," has lived in France since 1984.
Interestingly, the
suitcase in this story is full of novels by French authors—Balzac,
Rolland, Stendhal, Voltaire (all in Chinese translation). Balzac
and the Little Chinese Seamstress became a runaway best seller
in Europe and is the recipient of five literary prizes. It has
been made into a film by the author.
Shot on location in
China, the film is scheduled for release this year. Washington
Post critic Michael Dirda called this novel a testimony to "the
power of art to enlarge our imaginations, no matter what the circumstances"
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