Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel
by Dai Sijie

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Book Reviews of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

Book Review: A fascinating story of art surviving the Cultural Revolution
Summary: 5 Stars

The author transported me back in time to 1971 and to a village at the summit of a mountain in China near Tibet where two teenage boys are being "re-educated" as part of the Cultural Revolution led by the Gang of Four. They are being "re-educated" because their parents are medical professionals. The narrator's parents are medical doctors whose crime was that they were "stinking scientific authorities". His friend's father is a dentist who had fixed the teeth of Mao Zedong, Madame Mao and Chaing Kai-shek and whose crime was mentioning their names together in public.

The village is surrounded in mist. No electricity, only oil lamps, no vehicles, no commercial activity of any kind, not even a clock--the villagers tell time by sunrise and sunset. The village is illiterate. The villagers work in the paddy fields or the coal mines every day.

The teenagers are assigned to a hut on stilts with no furniture other than two beds. Underneath their hut is a "pigsty occupied by a large, plump sow"

The Cultural Revolution turns everything around. The narrator, age 17, has a violin ("Wy-o-lin") and he plays a Mozart piece that enthralls the village and which he calls "Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao" so that it will not be considered reactionary.
The Old Miller's song, "Tell me/What does the young nun fear?/She fears the old monk/No more and no less/Just the old monk", becomes "Tell me/Little bourgeois lice,/What do they fear?/They fear the boiling wave of the proletariat."

The narrator's friend Luo, age 18, is a great storyteller. To the delight of the village headman, Luo tells stories of films he has seen. The headman then sends the two boys on foot to the small town of Yong Jing, a four day trip, so that they can see the monthly cinema shown there and to retell its story to the villagers.

The Seamstress is the very attractive daughter of the only tailor in the district. The tailor is so important that he travels in a sedan chair borne by two bearers followed by a porter carrying his sewing machine.

Coal is the primary source of heat. For a few weeks, the boys work naked in a coal mine, with passages so low that they have to crawl. Luo contracts malaria, the first cure for which is whipping him with tree branches. When the still sick Luo arrives at the Seamstress's house she brings in four sorceresses at midnight to frighten the evil spirits from his body.

In the midst of this total misery, the boys and the Seamstress are able to find some banned books, secretly owned by "Four Eyes", another boy being "re-educated" in an adjoining village. The first book is Balsac's Ursule Mirouét. Others follow, books by Dumas, Flaubert, Gogol, Melville and Romain Rolland. These books transport them into the nineteenth century where they discover romance and love, emotions banned during the Cultural Revolution.

In the privacy of their hut, they tell the story of the Count of Monte Cristo to the old tailor. The tailor then sews blue sailor trousers with "fluttering bell bottoms and whiff of the Côte D'Axur." Five-pointed anchors are embroidered on buttons.

A dying preacher is surrounded by his family with a tape recorder pleading: "If you could just repeat one of Chairman Mao's sayings-that would be perfect. Just a few words, or a slogan, go on, try! They'll know their grandfather wasn't a reactionary after all, that he'd put all that behind him!" The only thing the tape recorder catches, however, is a final prayer in Latin.

Only after he is promised the Fu Lei translation of Balsac, does the doctor the narrator finds agree to terminate the Seamstress's pregnancy. Fu Lei had been labeled a class enemy.

To the Cultural Revolution, Western Culture is like a cancer that must be removed to preserve the Communist Society. As the novel demonstrates, Western Culture has spread too far to be killed. The remnants that remain, however, are indestructible and continue to grow back.

Spiritually, the boys are not far from their parents. The narrator uses his knowledge of the medical world to help the Seamstress find a doctor. Luo uses his father's skills to fill a cavity in the headman's tooth.

Many of the characters in the book (the boys, the Seamstress, the tailor, the village headman, the doctor, the villagers) are benefited by the transformative power of fiction, whether they read it or hear it from the boys. I too felt its power when I read Sijie's novel.

Summary of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

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