Balzac and the Chinese seamstress

Dai Sijie. - Balzac and the Chinese seamstress. Editions Salamander. 2001

The work of Dai Sijie, who fully deservedly catapulted to the reputation his author, is a beautiful novel ambientada in the remote regions of the west of Sichuan, during the sad years of the Cultural revolution. Following the experiences of one pair of young people sent to these distant grounds to reeducarse between the peasants, we see like the discovery of the books it transforms his lives, and those of the people who surrounds them. In an ambience in which all the "cultural" resources are controlled by the state, with the clear target to create a few persons shaped to the taste of the leaders, the discovery of which one of the young people sent to a remote mountainous region for reeducarse, it has a treasure of books of western authors translated into the Chinese, it provokes a stir between his partners.

His fascination increases when they manage to read a work of Balzac. Knowing, across the pages of the Gallic author, through which the life one can live otherwise, it transforms completely the monotonous stock of two protagonists, and of the people who surrounds them.

The description of the life of the persons, still in this isolated region, shows us that the political experiment that they suffer, is destined for the defeat from the same conception. Every person is still alone in the heart of the ground, as says the poet. His forced life in community, realizing "inadequate" tasks in the middle of other persons submitted to identical tension, is a condemnation, of which each one is liberated as soon as it has opportunity. The leaders are the first ones who know the reality of this called Cultural "Revolution".

The curious thing is that in the middle of this stultification that provokes this called Cultural revolution, one of the paradoxes of the metalanguage of the dictatorships, it is precisely the discovery of a book, which throws a hope flame.

Thus it shows the value of the book (and the reading) as beginning, like liberation. If the literature is the vehicle that he allows us to dream of distant, nonexistent, imaginary worlds, and come out thus our daily reality, the work proposes to us also the possibility of dreaming of that one day we will be able to dream, since unfortunately the globalization of the mass media, bombards us every day with a concept of life of that we cannot escape.

An obrita of simple reading, which in spite of fleeing of any didactic intention, breaks a spear in favor of the good literature. This immortal literature capable of winning to the proper reality.

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