The Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong altered Chinese history in the 1960s and '70s, forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to peasant villages for "re-education." This short novel is by a writer who was himself re-educated in the '70s and tells how two young men endured years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind. Dai Sijie's unnamed 17-year-old protagonist and his best friend, Luo, are doctors' sons, and as a result are condemned to serve four years in a remote mountain village, carrying pails of excrement daily up a hill.
The two friends are good at storytelling, and the village headman commands them to reenact cinema shows for the villagers, reciting the plots and dialogue of movies. When another city boy leaves the mountains, the friends steal a suitcase full of forbidden books he has been hiding, knowing he will be afraid to call the authorities. Enchanted by the prose of a host of European writers, they dare to tell the story of The Count of Monte Cristo to the village tailor and to read Balzac to his shy and beautiful young daughter. Luo, who adores the Little Seamstress, dreams of transforming her from a simple country girl into a sophisticated lover with his foreign tales. He succeeds but lives to regret the consequences.
Sijie has a beautiful writing style and it is a shame this novel is so short as I could have kept reading on, although towards the end it almost lost me as it changed writing styles drastically, but thankfully found it’s way back.
The topic of the Mao dynasty is very intriguing to me and this story give a light-hearted insight in to one of the many different stories.
This book was a bargain for only $5 at a second-hand book fair, and now that I have read it once I think it will sit in my bookcase until it gets lent out to someone new as although I enjoyed the story and read it quite quickly, I don’t think it is one I could read again soon.
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