#21-Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Real quick, just to bring you up to speed, the other day I read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, or Balzac et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise, if you're from Balzac's homeland. It was written by Dai Sijie in 2004 and is 184 pages long. I luuuuuuved it. It's a fictionalized account of Saijie's experiences as a young man in Communist China. In the sixties, Mao closed all the colleges and schools and forced the educated boys to go live in poor villages in the mountains for what he called a "re-education." This tells the story of two boys, one of whom falls in love with the tailor's daughter, and a suitcase of banned books they find and read. (Mao has forbidden all written materials that aren't Communist propaganda.) They soak up Flaubert, Balzac, Dumas, Melville and more while in their cabin at night, foregoing sleep to read. The book has such lovely imagery, and the idea of having to read in secret is both outrageous and delightfully wonderful to me at the same time. I even loved the end, which is rare. Read this, it's like a lovely little brook running over your feet on a warm day.