It’s a poignant tale but what stops if from being overly sugary is the way Sijie interjects humour into his narrative. In essence this is a story of the joy and despair of young love or of ‘love against all the odds’. She too goes through a process of education but the result is not one the boys expect and the experience has a profound effect on their lives. When the Little Seamstress enters their lives, their passion for books and their passionate desire and love of this beautiful tailor’s daughter coalesce. Literature becomes their passion and a way of escaping the desperation of their situation. They devour the books huddled over an oil lamp in their barren room, often reading throughout the night until the first light of dawn. A chance encounter leads them to a suitcase full of forbidden books by Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert. During the Maoist regime of 1970’s China, reactionary individuals were packed off to the countryside to be cleansed of their bourgeois attitudes and made ideologically pure through daily toil and close contact with the peasant stock.įor the two central characters of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, their exile in a remote village close to Tibet provides an education far removed from that desired by the leaders of the Cultural Revolution.
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