Sijie Dai - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Books

Pros: Approximately 200 pages of beauty, truth, elegance, grace, and power.
Cons: There are no cons, just an overflowing torrent of pros.

How would you cope if you lived in a world of lies – in a world where lies were represented as truth, and truth was strictly forbidden? Would you or could you discern truth if it had been purposely withheld from you and replaced by the ...

Pros: Held my interest, well written with history of re-education of Chinese children.
Cons: None that I could find.

Another book I probably would not have read but for my Book Club. One never knows when a novel has something to say and tells the story well. The book was by a Chinese author Dai Sijie titled Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and I felt ...

Pros: extremely well written, a true treasure.
Cons: it will be made into a movie soon.

I've discovered a small branch of a public library system which has most of the just released and hard to find novels on their shelves. For me this is better than working at a bookstore because like a bookstore, the books are all present, but I don't...

Pros: wonderful prose, engaging, semibiographical perspective, story, compassion for characters
Cons: book is too short

The Los Angeles Times Book Review had this to say about Dai Sijie's novel: "An unexpected miracle -- a delicate, and often hilarious, tale." The Boston Globe complements how it "Gives the rest of the world a glimpse into that dark place where the human ...

Pros: Unsentimental, un-selfconscious story of reeducation in rural China in the 1970's
Cons: Too short!

This is the first novel for Dai Sijie, a formerly "reeducated" Chinese citizen, and now a resident of France.

This book centers on the lives of two teenage boys, the sons of upper-class parents, who are taken to a remote mountain village for...

Pros: Over all an excellent book you will remember forever.
Cons: The ending is abrupt.

This is by far the bet book I have read in 2007 so far. It was, an excellent story. The book is about two boys, the story teller and Luo, two children doomed to re-education in the mountains of eastern China. There parents were doctors, so they were ...

Pros: Emotionally stimulating Beautifully written Historically telling
Cons: Ended too quickly

I picked up this book because it was short and I loved the cover, and was delighted by what I found inside. I had always been fascinated with Asian and China in-particular so I thought this would be a good way to stimulate some deeper exploration into...

Pros: Adolescent boys weave their way through a singular adventure in a foreign and forbidding landscape.
Cons: The flatness of the writing does not lift it above the average novel.

There are better and more finely written books on the life in the Chinese countryside - The Garlic Wars and Emerald Mountain are two.

But this one has its charm, being more a tale of adolescent ineptitude in any country than observations of life in rural China.

The writing - perhaps its the translation - is too bland to carry the subtle weight of the blend of peasant bluntness and rustic mysticism.

Still, I read it in a few days, as the style makes it more rather than less accessible.