Björn recenserade Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress av Dai Sijie
None
3 stjärnor
Short little tale about two supposed bourgois degenerate (since their parents had actual educations) teenagers who get sent to a small Chinese mountain village during Mao's cultural revolution. There, they labour in misery and near-starvation (physical and intellectual) until they discover two things: a friend with a secret cache of Western literature (Balzac, Dumas, Dostoevsky, Flaubert) and a pretty but uneducated girl in the next village...
Quite enjoyed it, even though it doesn't really have the emotional or narrative weight that the story might have warranted; you rarely get the feeling of being sucked into the story, since Sijie for the most time is comfortably lodged in first-person way-past-tense mode - for a book about the lure of forbidden fiction and love, it reads a little too much like a long-ago memory told from a safe distance. Enjoyable, but not great (though I might have caught on more if I …
Short little tale about two supposed bourgois degenerate (since their parents had actual educations) teenagers who get sent to a small Chinese mountain village during Mao's cultural revolution. There, they labour in misery and near-starvation (physical and intellectual) until they discover two things: a friend with a secret cache of Western literature (Balzac, Dumas, Dostoevsky, Flaubert) and a pretty but uneducated girl in the next village...
Quite enjoyed it, even though it doesn't really have the emotional or narrative weight that the story might have warranted; you rarely get the feeling of being sucked into the story, since Sijie for the most time is comfortably lodged in first-person way-past-tense mode - for a book about the lure of forbidden fiction and love, it reads a little too much like a long-ago memory told from a safe distance. Enjoyable, but not great (though I might have caught on more if I myself had been familiar with most of the works referenced).