Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Author(s): Dai Sijie

Literary Fiction

"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 Cu

Name on half title


Product Information

Shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2002.

General Fields

  • : 9780099286431
  • : Random House UK
  • : VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET
  • : 0.13
  • : April 2002
  • : 198mm X 126mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Dai Sijie
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : very good