Balzac and China

This month’s book­club book was “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seam­stress: A Nov­el” by Dai Sijie, which has received rave reviews from all over. I found it a nice, easy read that touched on some extremely dif­fi­cult sub­jects (the Cul­tur­al Revolu­tion, the dif­fi­culties of peas­ant life, life’s inequit­ies, abor­tion, and failed dreams) extremely lightly. The tone feels like sum­mer read­ing des­pite these sub­jects. It was­n’t a sur­prise to learn the author is a film-maker — you can almost see the Chinese moun­tains and the mist and the poverty-stricken vil­la­gers cut off from civilization. 

One advant­age of a book­club is to make you see things you would oth­er­wise miss in a book; in this case the irony of two teen­agers being sent to be re-edu­cated who end up edu­cat­ing the vil­la­gers about music, films, clocks, and dent­ists. And we spent a little time dis­cuss­ing the shifts in tone and nar­rat­or in the book and wheth­er that had deep­er sig­ni­fic­ance, or was meant to indic­ate any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, or not. But most of the time we talked about oth­er things, like every­one’s fam­ily his­tory (ran­ging from Chinese/Japanese through Irish/French), which I think shows the book some­how did­n’t grab our ima­gin­a­tions the way oth­er books have (such as “King Leo­pold’s Ghost” by Adam Hoch­schild). Worth read­ing (and does­n’t take long to read), but not a great book. I hear the film is worth see­ing, though.