Translated from the French by Ina Rilke 2001
The magic of story-telling comes alive within this enchanting fable about the narrator and Luo, two teenage boys sent to remote Phoenix mountain for re-education during Mao Zedong's reign in China, 1971. What would have been a very hard and drudging life drastically changes after they discover and take possession of a suitcase full of translated classic books. They become particularly enraptured with Balzac's book, Ursule Mirouet, which they use to win the heart of a beautiful Chinese seamstress.
'The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin. Among the possessions brought to this mountain village by the two "city youths" -- which was how they saw Luo and me -- it was the sole item that exuded an air of foreignness, of civilisation, and therefore aroused suspicion.'(opening lines)
'A few words about re-education: towards the end of 1968, the Great Helmsman of China's Revolution, Chairman Mao, launched a campaign that would leave the country profoundly altered. The universities were closed and all the "young intellectuals," meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be "re-educated by the poor peasants."'(6)
"The saying goes: a sincere heart can make even a stone blossom. So tell me, was the flower girl's heart lacking in sincerity?"(35)
'Ba-er-zar-ke." Translated into Chinese, the name of the French author comprised four ideograms. The magic of translation! The ponderousness of the two syllables as well as the belligerent, somewhat old-fashioned ring of the name were quite gone, now that the four characters -- very elegant, each composed of just a few strokes -- banded together to create an unusual beauty, redolent with an exotic fragrance as sensual as the perfume wreathing a wine stored for centuries in a cellar.'(56)
'Then I was seized with an idea: I would copy out my favourite passages from Ursule Mirouet, word for word. It was the first time in my life that I had felt any desire to copy sentences from a book.'(58)
'The old man ran his fingers lightly over the strings of his instrument, which he held like a guitar. After a few notes he launched, almost inaudibly, into song. Our attention was immediately drawn to the contortions of his stomach, the sight of which was so extraordinary as to obliterate his voice, the tune and everything else from our consciousness. Being so thin, he didn't actually have a stomach at all, just wrinkled skin forming innumerable tiny folds on his abdomen. When he began to sing the wrinkles billowed out, forming little waves that rippled across his tanned and gleaming body. The band of plaited straw that served as his belt began to undulate too. Every now and then it disappeared into a roll of skin, but just as it seemed lost forever in the tidal flow it re-emerged, dignified and pristine. A magical waistband.'(73)
'When planning our strategy a few days earlier we had come to the conclusion that the success of our illegal entry hinged on one thing: knowing were Four-Eyes had hidden his suitcase. How would we find it? '(98)
'It was all such a long time ago, but one particular image from our sting of re-education is still etched in my memory with extraordinary precision: a red-beaked raven keeping watch as Luo crawled along a narrow track with a yawning chasm on either side. On his back he carried the inconspicuous, work-soiled bamboo hod in which he had secreted Old Go, as Balzac's Pere Goriot was titled in Chinese -- the book he was going to read to the Little Seamstress, the lovely mountain girl in need of culture.'(109)
'Suddenly, I felt the stirrings of an uncontrollably sadistic impulse, like a volcano about to erupt. I thought about all the miseries of re-education, and slowed down the pace of the treadle.'(134)
'That the ultimate pay-off of this metamorphosis, this feat of Balzacian re-education, was yet to come didn't occur to us. Were we wrapped up in ourselves to notice the warning signals? Did we overestimate the power of love? Or, quite simply, had we ourselves failed to grasp the essence of the novels we have read to her?'(180)
First Anchor Books Edition, November 2002
184 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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