This book review is slightly long - but I crammed it full of thought, feeling, experience and imagination. Then I lovingly planished the prose until it flowed smoothly.
This diary has sandpipers vs. monsters on Venice Beach, why food is harder to describe than a book, Communists and opium dealers, how words can be magic, and a takedown of the New York Times. Woven between those lines, it has a few glimpses of the very enjoyable Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
Just read the whole diary. If it doesn't make you smile, I guarantee that I'll give you your money back.
I lived many years in Chicago, until the abominable interminable winters wore me down. Then I moved here, to Los Angeles. Now I'm surrounded year-round by energy, sunshine and beautiful people. But I'm also surrounded by a sprawling mass of buildings and roads. LA is how NYC would look, if you dropped it from an airplane. My easiest escape from all this city is to walk off Santa Monica Pier (the side, not the end), and wander down to the waterline. I wade south for miles between waves and sunbathers, past all the skittering baby sandpipers who flee before my footfalls, for I am their Godzilla.
Suppose one day you came with me. After rampaging and flattening the length of the beach, we'd reach Venice Boardwalk, then walk a block further. We'd take our gargantuan hungers to Mao's Kitchen, which is a good place for feasting. My favorite dish there is the Weiwuer Lamb (Coconut Curry is a fine vegetarian option). When you ask me what the Weiwuer Lamb tastes like, I can share my subjective responses, or tell you what it says on the menu:
Weiwuer Lamb 12$ A popular street food from the ancient silk road region in northwest China. Sea salt, cumin and chili powder with sliced lamb, cashews, jicama, celery, tomato, onion and cilantro.
However, the far better way to show you what the Lamb tastes like (I'm sure you'll agree) would be to give you a few bites to eat. That would get you past my individual taste, and this veil of approximate descriptions, to real experience of the thing itself. Similarly, if you want to discover precisely what
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is like, you should read the novel yourself.
My metaphor is imperfect (like all metaphors). Weiwuer Lamb is food, so we sample its salient qualities via chemical reactions in our tastebuds and nostrils, and by feeling its texture in our mouth; but since Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is already made of words, the words in this review can (if I do it right) capture more closely the substance of the book. Nevertheless, the bites I compose for you will not be Dai Sijie's own cooking - just my personal impressions, a few of the aspects that I saw in the surfaces of Dai's dish.
Show without Spoiling and Quote without Stealing
In my reviews, I like to share a fetching and representative quote from the text: an excerpt to show you the style of the book, and a glance at some deeper themes. Which offers but a tiny porthole, to survey the wide ocean a novel can encompass. When you reach this passage in the course of reading the entire book the writer's context, layering and craft will shed more light and rippling hues on it than my spy-hole can show.
I hate spoilers. The thrill and intrigue in a plot-twist is best experienced while sailing the whole story. But my review cannot convey any shape of the novel without spoiling part of the plot. Anything I tell you about Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress will reveal some glimpse - which Dai has already unwrapped better. My easiest escape from this conundrum is to quote a passage from the book's opening pages, so I keep hidden the layers and turnings that come later. It helps me in hunting excerpts, that good books usually have great openings. The writer polishes their first pages with extra care, and uses them to introduce their world, characters, themes and style.
I'm about to quote the second and third pages of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, so you can taste Dai's cooking and his main ingredients. I need two pages to feed you every mouthful of one telling anecdote; even so, it works better in the four-page telling Dai opens his novel with. Aren't we diarists supposed to limit excerpts to "about three paragraphs" on Daily Kos? Not in this case. If you're curious about these matters, DrLori wrote a good primer on Authorial Matters: References, Plagiarism, and Copyright.
DrLori links to the one-page overview, Fair Use Frequently Asked Questions. That has two pertinent points. One, I'm not depriving Dai of any income from his book: my review won't infringe on his profits - though it may add to them, if anyone reads this, then decides to buy his book. Two, one factor determining fairness of use is, "The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole . .". If three paragraphs is a reasonable excerpt from a newspaper article, then a book review may quote a couple of pages. I don't usually want to quote two whole pages of a novel, but these two pages offer a surprisingly comprehensive taste of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, from its main meat down to its subtler spices.
Re-Education in the Chinese Countryside
The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a social-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. Set into motion by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, its stated goal was to preserve 'true' Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Party.
From 1968-75, Chinese youths who were suspected of foreign, intellectual or bourgeois influence (especially via their parents) were exiled from the cities to work in the boondocks, where they could be re-educated in wholesome proletarian values by immersion in peasant life. Dai Sijie was re-educated in Sichuan Province from 1971-74. A generation later, he mined these experiences to lay the foundation of his first novel.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress opens with the narrator (17) and his friend Luo (18) getting banished from Chengdu to a mountain near Tibet. They arrive at their village after a long trek. The headman and all the villagers crowd into the largest hut, to inspect the "young intellectuals" and their belongings. Everything looks normal, except the narrator's violin, which "exuded an air of foreignness, of civilization, and therefore aroused suspicion." So the headman peers and pokes, shakes and sniffs it.
Still no clues.
He ran his calloused fingertips over one string, then another . . . The strange resonance froze the crowd, as if the sound had won some sort of respect.
"It's a toy," said the headman solemnly.
This verdict left us speechless. Luo and I exchanged furtive, anxious glances. Things were not looking good.
One peasant took the "toy" from the headman's hands, drummed with his fists on its back, then passed it to the next man. For a while my violin circulated through the crowd and we - two frail, skinny, exhausted and risible city youths - were ignored. We had been tramping across the mountains all day, and our clothes, faces and hair were streaked with mud. We looked like pathetic little reactionary soldiers from a propaganda film after their capture by a horde of Communist farm workers.
"A stupid toy," a woman commented hoarsely.
"No," the village headman corrected her, "a bourgeois toy."
I felt chilled to the bone despite the fire blazing in the centre of the room.
"A toy from the city," the headman continued, "go on, burn it!"
His command galvanised the crowd. Everyone started talking at once, shouting and reaching out to grab the toy for the privilege of throwing it on the coals.
"Comrade, it's a musical instrument," Luo said as casually as he could, "and my friend here's a fine musician. Truly."
The headman called for the violin and looked it over once more. Then he held it out to me.
"Forgive me, comrade," I said, embarrassed, "but I'm not that good."
I saw Luo giving me a surreptitious wink. Puzzled, I took my violin and set about tuning it.
"What you are about to hear, comrade, is a Mozart sonata," Luo announced, as coolly as before.
I was dumbfounded. Had he gone mad? All music by Mozart or indeed by any other Western composer had been banned years ago. In my sodden shoes my feet turned to ice. I shivered as the cold tightened its grip on me.
"What's a sonata?" the headman asked warily.
"I don't know," I faltered. "It's Western."
"Is it a song?"
"More or less," I replied evasively.
At that instant the glint of the vigilant Communist reappeared in the headman's eyes, and his voice turned hostile.
"What's the name of this song of yours?"
"Well, it's like a song, but actually it's a sonata."
"I'm asking you what it's called!" he snapped, fixing me with his gaze.
Again I was alarmed by the three spots of blood in his left eye.
"Mozart . . . ," I muttered.
"Mozart what?"
"Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao," Luo broke in.
The audacity! But it worked: as if he had heard something miraculous, the headman's menacing look softened. He crinkled up his eyes in a wide, beatific smile.
"Mozart thinks of Mao all the time," he said.
"Indeed, all the time," agreed Luo.
Dai Sijie takes us into a triply strange world: we are in China, thrown into a peasant village on a remote mountainside, living under a Communist program of Re-Education. Luo and our narrator grew up in the capital of Sichuan Province, with successful, loving parents. Now they're crawling naked through coal-mine shafts, and carrying hods of slopping shit up steep mountain paths. And this is one of the best things about the book: because Dai writes vividly, and transports us into this alien, hardscrabble life; and because he weaves in enough warmth and wit that we never entirely despair, we keep struggling alongside our narrator.
The Magic in Words can Write us Brighter Futures
The dynamic engine of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is Language. The passage I quoted is so finely crafted, a well told tale with just the right words. It was written in French, but the English translation is deft. Dai offers the precise nuances we need to observe the private feelings and lines of communication between his characters. Consider a few lines from above:
"A stupid toy," a woman commented hoarsely.
"No," the village headman corrected her, "a bourgeois toy."
I felt chilled to the bone despite the fire blazing in the centre of the room.
"A toy from the city," the headman continued, "go on, burn it!"
His command galvanised the crowd. Everyone started talking at once, shouting and reaching out to grab the toy for the privilege of throwing it on the coals.
These two pages show so well the miasma of suspicion and resentment that our heroes are trapped in, a witch-hunt against all culture and free-thinking. Witness the raising-stakes labels the villagers stick to damn the violin - this innocent "toy" the villagers have never seen or heard of before. Share the chilling fear our narrator feels, as he stands accused and his fate grows perilous.
The keenest word here is Privilege, a stiletto sharp with irony. Because Privilege is just what Communism and the Cultural Revolution aimed to throw on the dust heap of history. However, humans being what we are, bold Comrades clambered right back up that dust heap to salvage anew privileges and power. This village headman isn't any wise leader, he's a crafty opium dealer turned apparatchik. Exactly as we saw in Animal Farm, the Communists overthrew their oppressors to make everyone equal - but soon the pushiest schemers were "more equal than others".
One of the harshest effects of the witch-hunt mindset is, it shrinks your world into Us and Them, where everything that doesn't fit the party line becomes an enemy. If you've ever watched Fox News you know what I mean. Dai Sijie found a lot to dislike in his years of Re-Education - but he's not out to vilify, he wants to introduce Western readers to a place and time in China which we rarely find in books. In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress he brings this remote mountain village to life, and shows us the diverse humanity in his cast of peasants. Some of them are selfish, others funny, others admirable. The ones we get close to have all these sides to them, and more.
Dai wove a tale of open humanity, that touched hearts around the world and got translated into dozens of languages - but not Chinese. According to the authorities there, Dai "blackened the characters of the peasants and treated them like idiots" and his novel failed because the changes that the characters go through should be "the result of reading a Chinese book". Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has a little too much Them in it: so it must be an enemy.
I love novels and write diaries, so Dai's deepest theme just tickles the toes of my heart. Throughout Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, words and stories enlarge the characters who read or write them, and change the arcs of their destinies. People recount the stories of movies they saw; collect folksong lyrics, and "improve" them; mutter a few words in Latin; read letters from home, or forbidden foreign books, or words written in a jacket's lining: each of these events ripples outwards, affecting the readers and writers, then all who are close to them. Sometimes brand new possibilities arise, but the prizes prove bittersweet.
My Book Review is Better than the New York Times's
To be fair, theirs isn't completely useless. Brooke Allen gets the gist of Dai's work, explains it clearly, and easily trumps me with the background and historical context he provides. Also, he didn't frighten any innocent birdies on Venice Beach. Sadly, half his review is a nutshell recounting of Dai's finely crafted tale: i.e. a mess of spoilers. Why do experienced critics think this is a worthwhile way to review a book? It seems to me that you know it's a good book when you find a teeming jungle of hints and depths hiding beyond the story's surface - but that surface is all a précis review looks at.
You've been warned. If you enjoy spoiler-packed reviews, or if you've already read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, here is Brooke Allen's NYT Review. Allen does find a few deeper insights, but in my opinion he gets the sharpest of those completely wrong:
''Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress'' is a worthwhile book, but in many ways an unsatisfactory one. Its problem is that the tale is more interesting than the telling. Dai has elected to present his story as a fable rather than a realistic novel, a perfectly respectable choice except that the descriptions of life in this strangest of times and places are so riveting that the reader longs for more. Dai's decision to streamline his narrative, withholding all but the most significant details, and his coy habit of giving his characters epithets rather than names, work against the very real power of his material.
. . . the novel is good, but not that good. I suspect that its gratification of French notions of cultural superiority has had much to do with its best-seller status in that country.
Dai does indeed withhold the names of most of his characters, calling them instead the headman, the tailor, the little seamstress, etc. This was a very deliberate choice he made. He wanted to write a universally accessible tale, which any reader could fully immerse themselves in. In this, he succeeded splendidly.
Allen also calls this 180 page novel "rather slight". It's easy to see it that way. If Dai had written his story twice as long, and stuffed it with more descriptions of this remote mountain known as the Phoenix of the Sky, and the people, animals and plants living there, and all the happenings of peasant society, I - like Allen - would have lapped that up. But Dai has the instincts and craft to fill in several precise details in every scene, so that his pages spring to life and we find ourselves climbing up that mountainside. He didn't need more pages to tell his whole tale.
Dai had two sources feeding his imagination when he wrote Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress; they helped him craft a novel that, though slight, shines with power and beauty. He had his own experience: 30 years in Communist China, and 3 being re-educated on a mountain in Sichuan - this gave him a sea of details to draw from, to find the very words to make his world fresh and striking. And he dreamed up a magical story, which flows and twirls and leaps at us, which holds together and is steeped in meaning and resonance. He lived it, he worked it, and he also got very lucky.
Not every good book should be long and hard, stuffed with learning and a thousand factual details. Not every satisfying meal needs to be a five course banquet, with all the trimmings you can think of. Sometimes one heaping platter of Weiwuer Lamb fills your body and tickles your heart.