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    Balzac and the Little chinese Seamstress
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    Balzac and the Little chinese Seamstress
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    Balzac and the Little chinese Seamstress
    Audiobook4 hours

    Balzac and the Little chinese Seamstress

    Written by Dai Sijie

    Narrated by B. D. Wong

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    An enchanting literary debut-already an international best-seller.

    At the height of Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for "re-education." The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin-as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor.

    But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed.

    From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 29, 2002
    ISBN9780739301029
    Unavailable
    Balzac and the Little chinese Seamstress

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    Reviews for Balzac and the Little chinese Seamstress

    3.5/5

    1,990 ratings117 reviews

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    • 3/5
      In 1971, the narrator and his friend find themselves exiled to a remote village for 'Re-Education' as part of Mao's Cultural Revolution. As offspring of intellectuals- 'enemies of the people' - they may never get away.The awful new life, with its filthy and dangerous tasks, is a far cry from the culture they loved, their only foray into it being occasional cinema trips; their only solace, meetings with the lovely but little-educated tailor's daughter.And then they come across a suitcase full of translations of classic European literature. The danger of possessing these banned volumes...and the thrill of being exposed to such works...gives new meaning to their lives, as they share them with the young woman.But what message will she takeaway from Balzac?It's a quick read, and it certainly brings to life the awfulness of life in China in this era. I can't say I massively engaged with the characters, but worth reading
    • 2/5
      Meh - this one was okay enough that I finished it. This one was required reading in high school for a dreaded lit class and, though it was a small read, it felt forever long. There wasn't much too entirely memorable about it years later. And so it sits on the shelf.
    • 3/5
      Interesting characters, though I felt the book was too short and certain characters and elements were not as developed as they could have been. Still, an interesting introduction to life in China during the Cultural Revolution
    • 2/5
      Two city boys are sent to a remote village for re-education during China's cultural revolution. In the mountains they meet the Little Chinese Seamstress, who both boys flirt and fantasize about. When a third boy leaves the mountains, they steal his pile of western books. I'm not sure what to say about this book other than "That's it?" I needed an epilogue or any conclusion at all. I felt that the book was aimless and just wandered all over the place. Overall, this one was not for me.
    • 4/5
      Two boys (aged 17 and 18) are sent from the city to a remote village for "re-education" during China's cultural revolution. They befriend the tailor's daughter (the "little Chinese seamstress" of the title). They also discover a number of banned, western books, translated to Chinese. The boys devour these stories and re-tell them to others in the village. This story tells of the power of reading to generate ideas and illuminate possibilities. I really enjoyed this book.
    • 4/5
      A book about the amazing power of books and stories.

      Favorite quote:
      "I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same."
    • 3/5
      I did like this a lot, but really, the fuss people have made over it! It's a coming of age story set in China during the cultural revolution. Features young male friendship and bonding, falling in love with the same girl, and the backdrop of forbidden Western literature, which in my opinion, these two young men greatly over rate.
    • 4/5
      A charming story.
    • 4/5
      Interesting book. I think it is more of a young adult book and the romance between the young people will resonate with them . I did lay it aside and read something else before returning to it. I love how the two city boys who were in the countryside to be re educated ended up re educating the peasant girl.
    • 3/5
      ** spoiler alert ** I liked a lot about this book, and the main character, and it's premise of reading forbidden western books in communist China, but I was filled with dismay by the approach the author took to the abortion. I understand that in communist China, the Little Seamstress wouldn't have had a choice but to get an abortion, but the way the abortion was presented too lightly. The ending of the book was not very satisfying either, I couldn't believe Luo would burn the books for anything less than avoiding discovery, and even then... I was also confused by the sudden character POV switch near the end.There were scenes I liked. At the beginning when Luo and the main character (whose name, if we were ever told it, I can't remember) saved the MC's violin by saying that he had played a concerto called "Mozart Loves Chairman Mao." That was interesting and served to show what a weird environment they were living in that claiming such an outrageous title for a Mozart piece could save a violin. I liked it when they stole the books from Four-Eyes, and I really liked the scene when they were fixing the village chairman's cavity, but given my high expectations for the book, I was quite disappointed.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book. I imagined myself as a young, middle school-aged boy from the city whose life has already changed and now must undergo a greater change by being sent away to be re-educated, even they his schooling had already been limited because of the new political regime. And now you are with your best friend away from all you know.

      That's how I imagine this book to be - a quick, playful read, that gives much details in some areas but merely implies in another. The reader is left with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the way way the story is left.
    • 4/5
      I seem to be on a tear this year of reading books about books. Most I've enjoyed, but few have presented the whole process of reading and learning in quite such a wonderful way as Dai Sijie does in this book. He ably illustrates the pleasures of reading, the way it takes us out of ourselves and improves our lives, by showing us how reading makes the whole process of "reeducation" in Mao's China more tolerable.

      He shows us how we can become obsessed with books and reading, whether because we are in intolerable situations, or simply because they give us a look into other worlds. The young men in this story risk a great deal for their books without questioning whether its worth it or not. And with the same story he shows us how reading brings people together, and ultimately how it can tear them apart when readers grow in different directions, when they take different lessons and ideas from the same books.

      It's a deft and surprisingly amusing story about reading, books, young love, ambition, hope, despair, and the power of stories. I enjoyed it tremendously.
    • 5/5
      Two young friends are sent to a remote Chinese village to serve as laborers - a part of their "re-education" during Chairman Mao Zedong's infamous Cultural Revolution (1970s). They share a forbidden suitcase of books with the beautiful little Chinese seamstress, and their lives are transformed forever. Though this book was originally written by the author in French, it was translated exquisitely into English. "A dusting of ashes clung to the bow as it slid across the gleaming metal strings in which the firelight was reflected. The instrument was mine, and I was the player." There were times when I literally got so caught up in the story that I couldn't put it down (usually a sign of good writing). Not only that, but I actually learned a lot about a time, place, and historical events that I didn't know much about before. This is a special story about true hardship and friendship, young and wild love, and the high price of freedom. I would recommend it to older teens.
    • 3/5
      This book has a very odd ending. Spoiler: the girl leaves the town. - I feel this is more suited to be a beginning. The author wrote of how she was patiently learned and prepared herself for the departure throughout the book. However, the reader is left wondering was it enough? What happens? And is a such an escape possible without later regret?
    • 4/5
      I miss my Minnesota book club -- although we had been living in Maine for several months, I got to meet with them in February 2006 and this was the book we were reading. Two teenage boys from intellectual families are exiled to the deep countryside during the Cultural Revolution. This is the story of their flirtation with a local girl and their discovery of Western classics like Balzac, in Chinese translation. It's a short and enjoyable book that nevertheless can be very discussable and give one a lot to think about.
    • 3/5
      Parts of this book are truly beautiful, but there isn't much to move the story along. It's more like staring at a gorgeous photo than watching a film, if that makes sense.
    • 4/5
      I found this an interesting English translation from French of the little novel, written by the author who left China in 1974. It tells of oppression under the Mao regime and the potential influence of Western literature on the people under control, with overtones of love, hope and escape. The writing is in relatively simple sentences, some of the transitional events beg some imagination of the reader, but overall a good read.
    • 4/5
      Laid up in bed, I reached for this slim volume, became completely immersed and forgot my physical woes for a delightful couple of hours. What this book lacked in pages,it delivered in impact and resonance. The descriptive passages were so lyrical, transporting me to a rural Chinese Mountaintop during the 1970's Communist Regime. Our narrator is a young man ripped from his urban home and family and placed amongst peasants for 're-education'. Western culture is forbidden and suspect. Through a variety of twists, our narrator comes upon a copy of Balzac and thirsts for more. Knowledge, literature, culture and a strong narrative line are the true heroes here.
    • 4/5
      I picked up Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress as an end-of-the-month quick read for the TIOLI challenge. I've seen it mentioned here and there for a while, of course, and this was a good excuse to try it. It was, indeed, a quick read, taking me a single afternoon to finish, but it wasn't necessarily short or shallow — there's kind of a lot going on, for as small as the book is.The plot is presented in the title: it's about how two city boys sent for re-education in the boonies of China in 1971 discover Balzac and a seamstress in a nearby village. The story tells how it happens that they should find such a thoroughly forbidden book in a time when the only books allowed are Mao's Little Red Book and scientific texts, and also how they meet and fall in love with this girl. The story ends when they lose Balzac and the seamstress. It's fairly simple, I suppose, on the surface, but there is a lot of layer to it, which I confess I couldn't quite pinpoint, for being so unfamiliar with the themes and motifs of the books the boys read (Balzac, Madame Bovary, the Count of Monte Cristo, Jean-Christophe).A more obvious layer of symbolism comes to the forefront towards the end of the novel, when a snake bites the seamstress's hand and leaves a scar — the books and stories, of course, are the Fruit of Knowledge. There's also the fact that the village where the boys are being re-educated is located on the Phoenix of the Sky Mountain, which has certain symbolic meaning.On the whole, I felt like I wasn't quite able to link up the undercurrents of meaning that I was detecting, which meant the book felt a bit hollow and unfinished. I think that if I were more familiar with the works of French literature referenced in the book, I would have had a richer reading experience.Also, I have a terrible phobia of dental things, and there is a series of scenes involving the headman's rotten teeth and using somewhat rudimentary tools to drill in preparation for a filling. I wasn't entirely prepared for that, and it was hard to read - I had to skip through, and worried that I might be missing important lines.
    • 3/5
      Chairman Mao sent thousands of youth into mountain villages from the city to be "re-educated" during the Chinese revolution. This is the story of the son of a doctor and the son of a dentist who were sent to a village. On the mountain, they encountered another young man undergoing re-education who had a suitcase full of contraband books, including Balzac. After reading the book, they shared the story with the daughter of a tailor who was a seamstress. It's an eye-opening look at some of what took place during the Chinese revolution. There is more to the plot, involving the stories of villages, residents of the mountain, family members, etc., but I don't want to give away the rest of the story. In the end, I liked the story, but I didn't love it. It does, however, make those of us who live in non-communist-regime countries grateful that we did not have to undergo a similar experience.
    • 4/5
      This almost ethereal little novel about the ways that ideas (as found in books) can change us touched me deeply enough to put it aside mid-way through in order to pick up and read a copy of Balzac's Ursule Mirouet, the work that touched off the journey embarked upon by the characters. Deft and delightful without being saccharine, this fable manages to capture both large (Chinese Cultural Revolution, first love, great literature's universality) and small (toothaches, storytelling, ) themes with equal aplomb.My favorite image in the book was of the woman, perched on a wooden chair, strapped to a porter's back as he climbed a mountain path, while she calmly sat knitting. Lovely!One question for Sijie: can you please explain the break in the narrative toward the end when you shifted narrators? Thank you.Minor beef with the publisher of the edition I read: the shoes? worn by the Seamstress? They were pink, not red. And canvas, not leather. Geez.
    • 4/5
      This is an unlikely story of two young Chinese boys sent to the countryside to be 're-educated' for the crime of having educated parents. The boys are both students, one is a musician. They are put to work carrying night soil to the gardens. But both boys are survivors, between them, they start telling the headman stories from the books they've read, censoring to conform to Mao's philosophy. This gains them a certain amount of freedom. They discover that another boy from their school is at a neighboring village. When they go to visit him, they discover that he has a cache of Western classics in Chinese translation. While trying to figure ways to get the books, the boys meet the daughter of the local tailor, who stays home, sewing, while her father is escorted from village to village to make and alter garments. Both boys fall in love with the girl, but she only loves one, while she likes the other. All three teens stumble their way through obstacles and emergencies, trying to pry the books away from their comrade and to discover love. Despite the harsh reality around these young people, this is a charming story of self-discovery and young love.
    • 3/5
      Oh, how I wanted to love this book! And, oh, how I simply did not by the end! This short novel starts out with two young men who have been sent to the Chinese countryside -- to a small village halfway up a mountain, in fact -- for "reeducation" after the rise of the Communist party. Their parents and families are considered too Western, or too liberal, or just not Communist enough, and therefore these two lads must learn to be good workers and good citizens, in the eyes of the regime, before they are allowed to return to their homes. This sounds like an inauspicious beginning, but from the moment we meet these two characters -- as they charm the village headman with the power of an alarm clock -- the novel's light touch and almost fairy-tale-like atmosphere enchant us. The first three-quarters of the novel offers up, essentially, a love letter to youth, to forbidden love -- of both literature and women -- and to the individual. It is, in many ways, a coming-of-age novel -- though the figure who truly comes of age here isn't necessarily the one you expect -- and the story is touched with nostalgia even when it describes hardship. It isn't until almost the very end that the wonderful balance of the book starts to disintegrate. Were I still in grad school, I might argue that the break down is intentional -- and indeed it might be. Dai Sijie inserts three seemingly random interludes toward the end that describe a scene of emotional significance; while the grad student in me wants to see these passages as homages to the poetic interjections of ancient Chinese novelists, for the leisure reader the effect is jarring. Each interlude breaks away a piece of the spell that the reader has been happily wandering in the midst of for most of the book. When the narrative resumes, the gloss is lost and nothing quite feels the same. Again, it could be a crafted point -- the end of the novel, which I will not reveal here, is not a fairy-tale ending (though it is symbolically satisfying), so perhaps it is for the best that the golden light in which the first portion of the story basked is gone, in order for the reader to appreciate what is happening more clearly. Still, I think I would have liked the ending more had I not lost the connection that had sustained my interest and appreciation for the bulk of the book. I say "bulk of the book", but in truth there is no bulk to speak of. This is a slim, swift story, barely a novel at all, and its size and pace invite a quick reading, but perhaps I would have been better off to slow down and savor each piece of the story carefully. That might have insulated me from the effect of the interludes, but one only perceives such things in hindsight. With things as they stand, I can only offer this warning for future readers: enjoy this book more slowly than you want to, and prepare to be frustrated near the end.
    • 4/5
      This book was an unexpected pleasure. Given the setting of rural China during the Cultural Revolution, I expected something grim and harrowing, and instead found lyricism, a great deal of humor, and an uplifting testimony to the power of literature. When two teen-aged sons of "class enemies" are sent to the mountains for re-education, they find a stash of forbidden Western books, including the Balzac of the title. Both are entranced with literature filled with real human emotion instead of socialist realist propaganda. When they meet the charming daughter of the local tailor, they share their books with her, with an unexpected result. There's romance here, and beautiful imagery, and the light touch makes the critique of those heavy-handed times that much more affecting.
    • 3/5
      A very spare novel about two boys, the children of educated doctors, sent to a remote mountain village for re-education during China's Cultural Revolution. They are tasked with hard labor and very little chance of returning home but find ways to amuse themselves. Luo is adept at storytelling and the unnamed narrator can play a little violin. Then they meet the Little Chinese Seamstress whom Luo woos with the words of French author Balzac, after scheming the forbidden book away from another boy, the child of a writer and poetess. The words of Western literature lighten their days and win them favors but prove to be more powerful on the Little Chinese Seamstress than they anticipated.
    • 4/5
      During China's Cultural Revolution, two teens are sent away from their urban, well-to-do families into the country, where they are to be "re-educated." Their city belongings are destroyed, but they manage to hold onto two relics of theirold lives: a violin, upon which a sonata is cheekily renamed "Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao" and a rooster alarm clock, the only timepiece in the village. The boy are ordered to complete messy and often digusting acts of hard labor, but their abilities to tell facinating stories periodically excuse them from this work. When they get a hold of a stash of forbidden novels, their storytelling takes on a whole new dimension, affecting those in the village, such as the titular Little Seamstress.Education is a theme in the novel. Not only are the boys meant ot be "re-educated" to rid them of the taint of "bourgeoisie," but the boys themselves undertake to educated the Little Seamstress by reading to her the forbidden novels. In both cases, the "teachers" have pupils that are determined to go their own way.The story is brief and charming, and the characters each shine in their own way.
    • 5/5
      Dai Sijie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)At the heart of the Chinese revolution came a period of reeducation for intellectuals when they were forbidden to go to school and were sent to work in the fields. One student I knew was prevented to go to the university for eight years, then she came to the States to study chemistry in college. Four years of hard work, away from her family and her child. We are free, we keep forgetting that to be an intellectual takes courage in most of the world, specially for women. Some women I formed in France never got a job and even got persecuted in their country of origin.There are real people behind the drama you see on TV. Mr Dai's book (Dai is the family name) was first written in French. It is about that period of cultural revolution in China and forbidden books. It is absolutely beautiful. You got to see the movie too (2002), it is one of these perfect movies that takes your breath way. Nothing happens in the movie, so if you cannot stand the kind, do not see it: just read the book, go watch an action movie instead. No hard feelings.
    • 4/5
      This was a really sweet little book about a love of reading and how literature is able to change your life. The setting of early 1970's China was almost incidental and yet of course a big part of the conflict. It was interesting because I don't know as much as I probably should about the Cultural Revolution.
    • 5/5
      A delight to read.This would have been a pleasant enough read but it was the humour embodied in the story that raised it to a 4.5 star book. At only 172 pages, it was a delight; I don't often say this but I'd have loved it to have been twice as long so that I could have given it 5 stars.Luo and his friend, the narrator, are teenagers in 1971 when they are sent to a remote Szechuan village for 're-education'. From the moment they arrive with a violin which they rescue from its fate of burning by announcing that one of the songs it plays is "Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao" it was obvious that this was not your usual cultural Chinese fiction. The boys are expected to perform the most mundane and unpleasant tasks but their upbeat attitude carries them through and provides the reader with an insight into this aspect of the Chinese cultural revolution without the usual misery.Luo's ability to tell wonderful stories results in their being sent on regular two day trecks to a neighbouring town just to watch cinema and report back. His versions of the films are a resounding success in the village.It is while on one of these trips that they meet The Chinese Seamstress and both fall madly in love. They also meet Four-Eyes, owner of an illicit collection of banned books - and they will stop at nothing to get their hands on these.The author was, himself, sent for 're-education' in the 1970s and this knowledge adds real authenticity to the narrative.There's a lot packed into this short novel, don't miss it.
    • 5/5
      Fabulous story set during the Revolution. Loved the characters.