Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I like the book a lot. It was interesting to see two teens in the midst of culture re-education. However I was confused towards the end of the book. The author switched tactics of writing with no warning and wrote from the view point of other characters in the book. The ending didn't seem to go with the beginning of the book.

I got this book as a gift, and it checks a lot of boxes for me: it's about two boys exiled to the countryside during China's cultural revolution who come across some Western literature that changes their lives. It was a little clunky, but had a lot to like.

Pros:
A quick, breezy read. It's easy to sympathize with and cheer for the main characters in their ordeal. It's also pretty funny at times, like a scene in the middle where they find themselves to be impromptu dentists. The magic of reading is also handled quite well, like a long scene in the middle where a boy tells the story of the Count of Monte Cristo over many nights. The romance is sweet, if a bit uncomfortable at times, and I thought a plot point towards the end about women's health issues was handled well and provided a real lens into the era.

I also learned a lot more about the Cultural Revolution, which I didn't know very much about besides the scenes in Three-Body Problem. I also thought that, similarly to Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin, this book did a pretty good job of 1) revealing the fundamental absurdity and arbitrariness of draconian, authoritarian governments, and 2) still having a serious enough tone at times to point out the real consequences of such regimes.

Cons:
Aesthetically, I think this is one of those books that loses something in translation. Some of the phrasing is a little clunky, and there's a bit in the middle where the narration style switches abruptly to an interview format, which really confused me. I'm sure it's much more cohesive and prettier in the original language.

I enjoyed the first two parts of this book but was rather disappointed by the underwhelming ending. The setting is very vivid, with the scenic location really setting the tone of the story. Some parts are also quite unexpectedly funny, although the narrative lost its focus and the latter part of the book felt quite disjointed. Still quite an easy and enjoyable read if you're interested in the time period discussed and if you want to read about the importance of intellectual freedom and the potency of literature.

For a contemporary fiction class. It was a good read and a both enchanting and viscerally unpleasant representation of re-education in China during the Cultural Revolution, but there was a shortage of oomph for me. I reserve the right to change my mind once we've actually discussed the work in class and I've had more time to think about it.

I wasn't sure of the reason for the chapters in the latter third of the book narrated by other characters. I didn't understand why the old miller was being brought back into the story or why we needed to witness this scene in the river from three different perspectives. It seemed to jar with the rest of the story and I'm not sure why the author let that happen.

The description of the books being burned was lovely, but I had a hard time believing that these boys would really have done it. Their eyes didn't shine over the Little Seamstress as much as they did over those books! I may have missed what it was that made her so important to them.

I'm just going to list out some of the different elements of the novel that I want to remember:
- Re-education, both for the boys and for the Little Seamstress; culture/knowledge and lack thereof each can be problematic. By why doesn't the Little Seamstress (or the narrator) ever get a name?
- The narrow path to the Little Seamstress's house with chasms on either side, his dreams about this path, and the significance of the red-beaked ravens.
- Looking for honest simple rural poetry in the bawdy peasant songs.
- Storytelling through books, films, oral tales; retelling and embellishment; the importance of performance in storytelling and the emotional power of stories.
- Reverence for the translator of the French novels in a novel itself written originally in French, translated into English.

I want to say something about how reading English translations from the French sometimes feels strange to me, but it seems wrong to hypothesize that since this is the language other than English that I am most familiar with, I can recognize the difference between what is translated directly or literally versus what is paraphrased, and this recognition of the translation in action as it were disrupts the flow of the story. I can't think of any good examples which is why my hypothesis is probably wrong but I'm just putting it out there.

Post-class notes: So the prof argued that there are two stories going on in this novel: the story of Luo and the Seamstress, in which the narrator plays a minor but increasingly significant role, and the story of the narrator‰ЫЄs development as an artist. So the three chapters from the miller's, Luo's, and the Seamstress's perspectives are the flexing of the new creative muscle the narrator has discovered in himself, and his recognition that he too has storytelling and creative powers in the way that at the beginning of the novel he felt only Luo had. Class discussion resulted in minor improvements in my opinion of the book but not enough to change the star rating. (Star ratings suck a lot.)