“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 the name of this song of yours?” [the headman demanded.]…
“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.
…
I played for some time. Luo lit a cigarette and smoked quietly, like a man.
This was our first taste of re-education. Luo was eighteen years old, I was seventeen.
Dai Sijie has crafted quite a gem with his novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Luo and the narrator are two city boys - children of parents deemed to be intellectuals under Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution - exiled to a remote countryside village for re-education.
But Luo and the narrator soon find themselves ingratiated with the village’s headman, who provides privileges to Luo for his storytelling talent and the narrator for his violin-playing skills, which serve to break the monotony of the village. The headman seems also to use the boys to raise his own standing as the village leader.
Luo is a quick thinker. Too clever for his own good at times. The narrator is the more introspective of the two and serves to provide the moral commentary for the events that unfold through the novel.
The village tailor and his daughter, the little seamstress of the title, enter early into the story. Luo is besotted. Thanks to their storytelling abilities, the boys obtain permission to travel to the city on a regular basis where they see movies and return to regale the village with the stories they see. Their travels to the city allow Luo the opportunity to develop a relationship with the seamstress.
The boys steal a cache of banned books from another friend also slated for re-education and therein lies the crux of the novel’s charge. Through their reading of the books, and Luo’s teaching the seamstress to read, do we see exactly why such books were banned under the Cultural Revolution. The growth of all three characters touched by the ideas in the Western novels they read proves Oliver Wendell Holmes’ statement that a mind once stretched by a new idea can never return to its original shape.
184 pgs.
