Dai Sijie: Balzac and the Little Seamstress

By GILBERT WONG

This novel performs the minor miracle of finding light in the darkness that was China's Cultural Revolution.

Two adolescents are sent for re-education to a remote rural village. Their crime is that their parents are university educated; their fathers denounced as renowned doctors. Because of their bourgeois parents, neither has much chance of making it back to the city and home.

Housed above a pen full of pigs, the pair of friends, Luo and the un-named narrator, embark on a life as beasts of burden. Their principle task is as bearers of buckets of sloppy human excrement from the village to the fields. Their only break from the drudgery is a visit to a neighbouring village over a mountain pass to visit the cinema. Once back, their job is to retell the stories they've seen to an audience of illiterate villagers.

At the next village, Luo meets the daughter of the tailor, a village beauty, known only as the little seamstress. Their infatuation is mutual. The fuel for their relationship and that between Luo and the narrator comes from a forbidden stash of books, European literature, hidden by their sometime friend Four-Eyes. Luo and the narrator's first experience, reading aloud a translation of Balzac's Ursule Mirouet, which takes an uninterrupted night, strikes a thirst in them for more.

The suitcase contains the works of Hugo, Dumas, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bronte, a pantheon of the West's finest. The novels become part of the seduction of the illiterate seamstress, who through Luo's readings gains a sense of a wider world and worldly wiles.

This novel is about the double re-education of the boys. The first at the hands of Chairman Mao, the second through literature.

Dai Sijie strikes a masterful balance between sharp cultural critique and an enchantingly wry sense of humour. Best of all each character sings in the mind. This might just be the finest book I've read on the Cultural Revolution. It deserves the widest audience.

Random House

$26.95