Sijie

A college professor of mine once began her class by asking us, "What is literature?" During the semester that followed we engaged in a series of debates about why - or why not - the particular piece we were studying met the standards of that label.

We never arrived at a definitive answer. But one thing we usually agreed on was that good literature has a lasting effect on the reader. It's powerful. It's memorable.

The enduring power of literature is the common theme for the Sunday Book Club's next two selections: "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie for April and "The Book Borrower" by Alice Mattison for May.

Sijie's short novel is set during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in China during the 1970s. It follows the struggle of two upper-middle-class teens - the unnamed narrator and his best friend Luo - to survive in the impoverished village where the Communist government has sent them for "re-education."

Sijie, himself a veteran of the re-education camps, paints a bleak picture of the remote village. The teens are forced to drag loads of coal out of a decrepit mine and haul buckets of animal waste on steep mountain trails.

They live in a drafty shack, wear rags and are allowed few possessions. But the discovery of another teen's suitcase full of banned books becomes a bright spot in their increasingly hopeless existence.

The narrator eagerly devours Balzac's "Ursule Mirou t," fascinated by the wonders of a Western world unknown to Chinese under Mao:

Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then been hidden from me.

In spite of my complete ignorance of that distant land called France (I had heard Napoleon mentioned by my father a few times, that was all), Ursule's story rang as true as if it had been about my neighbours. The messy affair over inheritance and money that befell her made the story all the more convincing, thereby enhancing the power of the words ... I did not rise from my bed until I turned the last page.

Luo, too, quickly reads the book from cover to cover and sets off toward a neighboring village to relate the story to the tailor's beautiful daughter. Luo is enamored of the little Chinese seamstress, and believes that by teaching her about the wonders of literature she will become sophisticated and cultured - the perfect woman for someone of his background.

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.