On Her Shelf

Month

June 2013

7 posts

Notes on Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I finished Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (by Dai Sijie) last night, after a down-and-dirty reading session on a flight to San Fran for work, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t like the book.

image

It was one of those situations where you’re sort of surprised at your not liking it, once you come to the end, because reading the book itself wasn’t a struggle. The ending was just beyond anticlimactic, and while that may have been a deliberate choice, to mimic some of the French authors referenced in the novel itself, the entire story really lacked some punch.

The premise is interesting, inherently: two young men in China are sent to the rural mountain villages in the throes of the People’s Revolution, to be ‘re-educated.’ I learned a great deal about this period in China, and the injustices so many experienced as a result of their being labeled the ‘bourgeois class.’ So that element of the novel definitely adds an interesting layer. But not enough to mask the underwhelming love triangle storyline.

The best thing about this book is that it has inspired me to want to read some of the French classics: Balzac, of course, and Rolland and Camus. So perhaps the Provence-inspired Francophile binge will continue into the French literary greats…

Jun 17, 2013
Jun 13, 20131 note
Jun 12, 20134 notes
Jun 11, 2013449 notes
Jun 10, 2013
Jun 7, 20138 notes
Jun 6, 20132 notes

October 2012

4 posts

Oct 20, 2012
#endlesssummer
Oct 11, 2012
#coffeeshopliving
Oct 8, 2012
Oct 7, 2012

September 2012

3 posts

Sep 19, 2012
Sep 4, 2012
#lastbitesofsummer #babyheirlooms
Sep 3, 2012

August 2012

8 posts

“I was prepared to love you,
And never expect anything of you.
If the spirit has left you baby,
Don’t lie to yourself.
Put them old records on,
And admit that it’s gone somewhere else”
—Dry The River, Weights & Measures
Aug 23, 2012
Aug 20, 2012
“Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.” —Pablo Neruda
Aug 16, 20129 notes
Aug 15, 20123 notes
Aug 14, 2012
“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night
Aug 10, 20121 note
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