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  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Paperback) By (author) Dai Sijie

  

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  Short Description for Balzac and the Little Chinese SeamstressTwo boys, both sons of doctors, are sent to the top of a mountain for "re-education" in Mao's China; an education that involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous paths. They discover instead the discreet charm of bourgeois literature and the local tailor's attractive daughter.
  Full description

  • Publisher: VINTAGE
  • Published: 01 August 2010
  • Format: Paperback 176 pages
  • See: Full bibliographic data
  • Categories: Contemporary Fiction
  • ISBN 13: 9780099286431 ISBN 10: 0099286432
  • Sales rank: 15,693

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Full description for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

• In 1971 Mao's campaign against the intellectuals is at its height. Our narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of being the sons of doctors, have been sent to a remote mountain village to be 'reeducated'. The kind of education that takes place among the peasants of Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous, foggy paths, but the two seventeen-year-olds have a violin and their sense of humour to keep them going. Further distraction is provided by the attractive daughter of the local tailor, possessor of a particularly fine pair of feet. Their true re-education starts, however, when they discover a comrade's hidden stash of classics of great nineteenth-century Western literature - Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy and others, in Chinese translation. They need all their ingenuity to get their hands on the forbidden books, but when they do their lives are turned upside down. And not only their lives: after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, the Little Seamstress will never be the same again. Without betraying the truth of what happened, Dai Sijie transforms the bleak events of China's Cultural Revolution into an enchanting and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit and the magical power of great storytelling.