Dai Sijie
Author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel
About the Author
Dai Sijie is a Chinese-born filmmaker and novelist who has lived and worked in France since 1984
Works by Dai Sijie
5000 mètres avant l'aube 2 copies
2007 1 copy
Les Filles du botaniste 1 copy
Balzac y la costurera China 1 copy
Balzac ve C ʹinli terzi k♯łz 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- 戴思杰
- Other names
- Дай Сы-цзе
- Birthdate
- 1954-03-02
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Sichuan University
- Occupations
- screenwriter
director
novelist - Short biography
- Born in China in 1954 of an educated middle-class family. The Maoist government sent him to a reeducation camp in rural Sichuan from 1971 to 1974, during the Cultural Revolution. Following his return, he completed high school and university, where he studied art history. In 1984, he left China for France on a scholarship to study Western art. There, he developed a passion for movies and became a director of three critically-acclaimed feature-length films: China, My Sorrow (1989) (original title: Chine, ma douleur), Le mangeur de lune and Tang, le onzième. None of his movies were popular. Dai turned to writing fiction. He wrote and directed an adaptation of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, released in 2002. He lives in Paris and writes in French because China has banned his books and films.
- Nationality
- China (birth)
France - Birthplace
- Chengdu, Sichuan, China
- Places of residence
- Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Paris, France - Map Location
- China
Members
Reviews
Perspective is a magic. Sijie, a survivor himself, manages to conjure up a touching, and often funny, story in a dark time. Our current class and intellectual and political divides around the world might make 1960s China seem a downright quotidian anachronism - but perspective. Reading this book, called to mind another survivor's work, [Woman from Shanghai], which was a more realistically, if fictionalized, brutal account. Sijie doesn't so much shy from the real as focus on the struggle to show more maintain hope and humanity. The two boys in the account are yanked from home and forced into service but find solace in the simple act of story-telling. While much of the literary illusions in the book were familiar, I suspect there was a fair bit of Chinese folklore that was lost to me. Indeed, the book itself felt like a fable, one with a moral about hatred and fascism. While all that sounds quite heavy, Sijie waves a light wand to make it quite beautiful and funny along the way.
4 bones!!!! show less
4 bones!!!! show less
Two "city boys", Luo and our unnamed narrator, are sent to the village of Phoenix in the Sky for re-education in 1971, during the Cultural Revolution. They meet and fall in love with the Little Seamstress, who lives in another village, and discover that their friend Four Eyes has some contraband of his own.
In two hundred pages, the author has written such an interesting tale about the power of story - whether it's books, cinema, or music - on both an individual and social level. The boys show more came for re-education, but what they end up learning isn't exactly what the government intended. Their story is understated, easy to read, and humorous, without being simple. A great book club pick that would reward rereading. show less
In two hundred pages, the author has written such an interesting tale about the power of story - whether it's books, cinema, or music - on both an individual and social level. The boys show more came for re-education, but what they end up learning isn't exactly what the government intended. Their story is understated, easy to read, and humorous, without being simple. A great book club pick that would reward rereading. show less
Back in the 1950s, the Chinese Communist party began shipping "counter-revolutionaries" (basically, anyone with money or an education) off into the Chinese countryside to be "re-educated" - aka develop an appreciation for such rural virtues as poverty, ignorance, and grueling labor. This short, episodic novel recounts the adventures of two BFFs sent off to be re-educated not because they themselves are intellectuals (neither of them come off as being particularly bright), but for the crime show more of being the sons of educated parents.
Exiled to a rural village on the side of a steep mountain, the boys settle into their new lives with little resistance. Eventually one of our protagonists falls for a beautiful young seamstress from another village, and their intellectual boredom is for a while dissipated by the acquisition of a suitcase full of forbidden western books, but that's about all there is in the way of plot. The rest of the novel is a series of more or less piquant episodes - "The time we tried to collect authentic folks songs from the village eccentric," "The time we went into town to see a movie," "The time the headmaster made us pull his rotten tooth," "The time we had to cross a scary crevasse" - told in prose that is almost childlike in its simplicity and repetition.
Yes, there's a bit of gentle irony at the end when the boys' brief flirtation with forbidden erudition results in disappointment and disillusionment - an outcome the Communist party would surely have approved - but that's about as deep as this gets when it comes to themes or meaning.
Enjoyed learning more about this period in history, and the invitation to reflect on storytelling's ability to ignite curiosity, empathy, and human potential. But the biggest question I have at the end of this has to do with Dai Sijie's storytelling rather than the story itself. Being entirely unfamiliar with Chinese fiction, I'm can't be sure whether this novel's simplistic storytelling, passive characters, and unsatisfying resolution are flaws, deliberate narrative choices, or merely represent authentic Chinese storytelling tropes and traditions? Perhaps this is one of those books that can't be critiqued using western literary conventions as a norm. show less
Exiled to a rural village on the side of a steep mountain, the boys settle into their new lives with little resistance. Eventually one of our protagonists falls for a beautiful young seamstress from another village, and their intellectual boredom is for a while dissipated by the acquisition of a suitcase full of forbidden western books, but that's about all there is in the way of plot. The rest of the novel is a series of more or less piquant episodes - "The time we tried to collect authentic folks songs from the village eccentric," "The time we went into town to see a movie," "The time the headmaster made us pull his rotten tooth," "The time we had to cross a scary crevasse" - told in prose that is almost childlike in its simplicity and repetition.
Yes, there's a bit of gentle irony at the end when the boys' brief flirtation with forbidden erudition results in disappointment and disillusionment - an outcome the Communist party would surely have approved - but that's about as deep as this gets when it comes to themes or meaning.
Enjoyed learning more about this period in history, and the invitation to reflect on storytelling's ability to ignite curiosity, empathy, and human potential. But the biggest question I have at the end of this has to do with Dai Sijie's storytelling rather than the story itself. Being entirely unfamiliar with Chinese fiction, I'm can't be sure whether this novel's simplistic storytelling, passive characters, and unsatisfying resolution are flaws, deliberate narrative choices, or merely represent authentic Chinese storytelling tropes and traditions? Perhaps this is one of those books that can't be critiqued using western literary conventions as a norm. show less
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 show more 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). show less
Quite enjoyed it, even though it doesn't really show more 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). show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 15
- Members
- 8,639
- Popularity
- #2,783
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 281
- ISBNs
- 152
- Languages
- 23
- Favorited
- 6
