islandhippy

I'm stuck in Cultural Revolution mode. I finished reading Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem (scroll down or click here to see earlier post) and loved it. I then travelled halfway round the world to present-day Peterborough (!) with Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother and really disliked this book (but enjoyed his first book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time). I'm now back in 1970s China once again heeding Chairman Mao's call to go "up to the mountains and down to the countryside", this time with Di Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. As with Jiang Rong's book, this is a semi-autobiographical novel which tells of the author's experiences being re-educated by living among peasents. But no longer are we on the vast Mongolian steppe, this book is set in a remote village located halfway up a mountian in Sichuan. The protagonists -- two teenage boys with a couple of years of high-school education, making them undesirable intellectuals -- meet a tailor's daughter in a nearby village and discover a collection of translated Western novels hidden by Four-Eyes, another boy sent from the city for re-education. As the boys get to know the seamstress and secretly read the banned books, they are able to transcend their pitiful surroundings and dream of lives and places they have never been exposed to before.