Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

For a contemporary fiction class. It was a good read and a both enchanting and viscerally unpleasant representation of re-education in China during the Cultural Revolution, but there was a shortage of oomph for me. I reserve the right to change my mind once we've actually discussed the work in class and I've had more time to think about it.

I wasn't sure of the reason for the chapters in the latter third of the book narrated by other characters. I didn't understand why the old miller was being brought back into the story or why we needed to witness this scene in the river from three different perspectives. It seemed to jar with the rest of the story and I'm not sure why the author let that happen.

The description of the books being burned was lovely, but I had a hard time believing that these boys would really have done it. Their eyes didn't shine over the Little Seamstress as much as they did over those books! I may have missed what it was that made her so important to them.

I'm just going to list out some of the different elements of the novel that I want to remember:
- Re-education, both for the boys and for the Little Seamstress; culture/knowledge and lack thereof each can be problematic. By why doesn't the Little Seamstress (or the narrator) ever get a name?
- The narrow path to the Little Seamstress's house with chasms on either side, his dreams about this path, and the significance of the red-beaked ravens.
- Looking for honest simple rural poetry in the bawdy peasant songs.
- Storytelling through books, films, oral tales; retelling and embellishment; the importance of performance in storytelling and the emotional power of stories.
- Reverence for the translator of the French novels in a novel itself written originally in French, translated into English.

I want to say something about how reading English translations from the French sometimes feels strange to me, but it seems wrong to hypothesize that since this is the language other than English that I am most familiar with, I can recognize the difference between what is translated directly or literally versus what is paraphrased, and this recognition of the translation in action as it were disrupts the flow of the story. I can't think of any good examples which is why my hypothesis is probably wrong but I'm just putting it out there.

Post-class notes: So the prof argued that there are two stories going on in this novel: the story of Luo and the Seamstress, in which the narrator plays a minor but increasingly significant role, and the story of the narrator‰ЫЄs development as an artist. So the three chapters from the miller's, Luo's, and the Seamstress's perspectives are the flexing of the new creative muscle the narrator has discovered in himself, and his recognition that he too has storytelling and creative powers in the way that at the beginning of the novel he felt only Luo had. Class discussion resulted in minor improvements in my opinion of the book but not enough to change the star rating. (Star ratings suck a lot.)