Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin.

Opening to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie translated from the French by Ina Rilke.

During China's Cultural Revolution, two young men, the best of friends, are sent to a remote village for re-education.  Two things help them make it through the years they spend away from their families, their school, their city: a beautiful girl and forbidden copies of Balzac.  The boys fall in love with both.

This is the basic premise of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke.  The book is slight, a quick read at just under 200 pages.  The story is light-hearted, the boys face neither serious danger nor serious consequences though they constantly push against the authority they live under.  The characters are well-drawn, fully believable people.  The setting is well described  The plot keeps the reader moving along at an entertaining clip.

I just didn't like it. 

Maybe it reminded me too much of what I didn't like about City of Thieves which is also about two young men basically having a rollicking adventure in the midst of terrible tragedy.  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was picked by my book club which has been picking very safe reading lately.  I keep thinking of Franz Kafka as quoted on Gautami Tripaty's blog, "We ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us."    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress neither wounds nor stabs.  A book set during China's Cultural Revolution ought to do both.

I grew so tired of the rich kid protagonists and their cultural superiority, their clear sense that they were better than everyone in the village, that by the end of the book, I was beginning to root for the Cultural Revolution a bit.  I'm not rooting for the Cultural Revolution, not at all, but when do we get the story of those villagers?  What was it like for the peasants who spent tens, maybe hundreds of generations in isolated poverty while the world grew rich around them.  What was it like to suddenly see a violin in middle-age when you'd never seen anything like it before?  I'm looking for the Chinese writer who'll give voice to those villagers, write their version of The White Tiger.  I bet that book would wound and stab. 

In the meantime, Dakota ate my copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.  So there.