Balzac and the Little Seamstress (Dai Sijie)

Balzac and the Little Seamstress is set in the times of the Cultural Revolution and curiously has been written more as a fable than a novel. The story is that of the narrator who remains nameless, and his friend Luo who as adolescents and children of doctors have been sent to a remote mountain village to be ‘re-educated’. They manage to deceive an acquaintance into giving up his suitcase of banned Western literature. The suitcase turns out to be a treasure chest indeed as their minds and hearts are opened up to ideas forbidden and even helps Luo to find and ultimately lose love in the form of the eponymous Little Seamstress.

Dai’s writing is unusual in that he keeps many of the principal characters and even their surroundings anonymous. It draws one in, so that the reader is left asking for more. Sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant and occasionally ironic the novel does not fail in its overall message, that no system can completely subvert the human hunger for independent thought and personal choice.

R. Tibrewala