Download Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress AudioBook Free
Here is one of those rare novels, so captivatingly original, so absurdly funny, surprising and moving, it crosses all boundaries. In 1971 Mao's campaign resistant to the intellectuals is at its height. Our narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of being the sons of doctors, have been delivered to a remote mountain village to be 'reeducated'. The type of education that occurs on the list of peasants of Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement along precipitous, foggy paths, but the two seventeen-year-olds have a violin and their sense of humour to keep them going. Further distraction is provided by the attractive daughter of the local tailor, possessor of an especially fine pair of feet. Their true re-education starts, however, when they discover a comrade's hidden stash of classics of great nineteenth-century Western literature - Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy and others, in Chinese translation. They need almost all their ingenuity to get their hands on the forbidden books, however when they certainly their lives are turned ugly. And not just their lives: after hearing their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, the Little Seamstress will never be the same again. Without betraying the reality of what happened, Dai Sijie transforms the bleak events of China's Cultural Revolution into an enchanting and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit and the magical power of great storytelling.
