Following his runaway best seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie gives us a delightful new tale of East meets West...After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalysis to twenty-first-century China. But it is his hidden purposeto liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisonerthat leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrats clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl.
'Muo - a little like Nabokov's Pnin and the protagonists of Naipaul's early novels - is a charmer. But Sijie's latest is a very rickety construction. Nevertheless, it will very probably be another reading group sensation.' - Kirkus.
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Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is an award-winning author and filmmaker. Caught up in Chinas Cultural Revolution, he was "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974, and spent time working in a camp in a rural part of Sichuan province. After his re-education, he completed high school and university in China before departing for France in 1984 on a scholarship. He directed his first film in 1989. His first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was published in France in 2000. The translation became a national bestseller in America.
Sijie currently lives and works in Paris, France.
Name Pronunciation
Dai Sijie: Dye See-jyeh
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth...
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