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Balzac and the Seamstress

"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie is one of those special books, moving and delicately twisted and full of insights about life under communism. It gives us a glimpse into a frighteningly oppressive world where learning and reading are political crimes punishable by death. The book is a fictionalized account of the author's own experience of surviving Chinese communism and in particular Mao's Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was Mao's grand experiment to reshape the very core of the consciousness of the Chinese people. Between 1966 and 1976, thousands of forbidden books were burned and millions of people were sent to remote villages to be re-educated. The re-education aimed to rid them of "intellectualism."

In early 1971 the 17-year old narrator of the book and his best friend, eighteen-year old Luo are sent to a "village in a lost corner of the mountains" called the Phoenix in the Sky to which there are no roads......

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Approximate Word Count: 646
Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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