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What readers think of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, plus links to write your own review.

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

by Dai Sijie
  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Readers' Rating (35):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 2001, 208 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2002, 208 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Reviews

Page 3 of 5
There are currently 36 reader reviews for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
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Mary

It was a very good book. It was easy to read, and it taught me a lot about the cultural revolution.
janie

Series of scenes flow full of poetry, beauty and imagery lived by strong and attractive characters. They take you away in the far, far in the space, far east far away deep in the mountains, far in time, not so far, the seventies, but anyway a past time in which western litterature takes you in the last century. It seems to me an escapist story and this is one of the themes of the book: how culture and especially western litterature becomes a way of escaping the surrounding materialist and oppressed by the mao dictature daily life... magic escape and its consequences...a story that when begun cant be stopped
yumyum

i love it!
This book rocks! I'm going to have to read it again, just to get the feel of it, but I really enjoyed reading it! I had to read it for a book report, but it was so worth it. There were some parts that kind of confused me though, so I'll definitely have to read it again. I was just too distracted the first time...
BB

I really enjoyed this book out of all the books I have read but I don't like the way how it ended.
Rooti Lewis

I thought the story was really interesting and entertaining. I wish the story would have concentrated more on the Cultural atmosphere at the time than on the sexual relationship between Luo and the Seamstress. Maybe the book could have been expanded to add more of the Cultural aspects of China during the Cultural Revolution.
Kurman

This is a sparkling, brightly written account of a terrible time in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution was a euphemism for Mao Zedong's despotic control of a huge mass of people, attesting to the adage that "...absolute power corrupts absolutely". I enjoyed the great humor that Dai Sijie manages to evoke from the essentially dark situation the protagonists are in. Their youth, their intelligence and their talents save them from despair and somehow even enable them to turn their condition into something positive. Love, incipient desire, and the ominous threat of danger all hang in the air. I await the film that will be made from this story.
cece

I was reading this book for mah HS honors class and i enjoy reading this book. It's not all that but yet it's not bad either.
Ellen Firth

this was a wonderful book that captured me with it's fairy tale plots and dimensional characters

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