Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress By Dai Sijie Book Analysis

Author : Sijie Dai
Publisher : Knopf Publishing Group
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : China
ISBN : 9780375413094

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai Pdf

An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.

Author : Sijie Dai
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : China
ISBN : 009949082X

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai Pdf

Author : Sijie Dai
Publisher : Random House
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : China
ISBN : 9780099286431

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai Pdf

Two boys, both sons of doctors, are sent to the top of a mountain for re-education in Mao's China; an education that involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous paths. They discover instead the discreet charm of bourgeois literature and the local tailor's attractive daughter.

Author : Bright Summaries
Publisher : BrightSummaries.com
Page : 25 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2016-02-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9782806270566

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Book Analysis) by Bright Summaries Pdf

Unlock the more straightforward side of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, a moving account of how two young Chinese men discover love and Western literature after the Communist regime sends them to a remote mountain village to be reeducated. As well as offering piercing social commentary on the realities of state oppression, this is a coming-of-age novel with a timeless, heartfelt message about love, friendship and the power of literature. Dai Sijie is an award-winning writer and filmmaker of Chinese birth, who has lived and worked in France since 1984. Find out everything you need to know about Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Author : Dai Sijie
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2006-06-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781400077144

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Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie Pdf

Having enchanted readers on two continents with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie now produces a rapturous and uproarious collision of East and West, a novel about the dream of love and the love of dreams. Fresh from 11 years in Paris studying Freud, bookish Mr. Muo returns to China to spread the gospel of psychoanalysis. His secret purpose is to free his college sweetheart from prison. To do so he has to get on the good side of the bloodthirsty Judge Di, and to accomplish that he must provide the judge with a virgin maiden. This may prove difficult in a China that has embraced western sexual mores along with capitalism–especially since Muo, while indisputably a romantic, is no ladies’ man. Tender, laugh-out-loud funny, and unexpectedly wise, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch introduces a hero as endearingly inept as Inspector Clouseau and as valiant as Don Quixote.

Author : Sijie Dai
Publisher : Random House
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Historical fiction
ISBN : 9780099521327

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Once on a Moonless Night by Sijie Dai Pdf

A young French woman in Peking in the late 1970s interprets between Chinese professors and Bertolucci for his film The Last Emperor. Afterwards, she follows a disgruntled old professor who tells her about a text believed to be taken directly from Buddha s

Author : Michelle E. Bloom
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2017-11-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824875114

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Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas by Michelle E. Bloom Pdf

Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.

Author : John Green,Lauren Myracle,Maureen Johnson
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2009-10-01
Category : Young Adult Fiction
ISBN : 9781101575178

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Let It Snow by John Green,Lauren Myracle,Maureen Johnson Pdf

Now a Netflix Original Film! #1 New York Times bestseller An ill-timed storm on Christmas Eve buries the residents of Gracetown under multiple feet of snow and causes quite a bit of chaos. One brave soul ventures out into the storm from her stranded train, setting off a chain of events that will change quite a few lives. Over the next three days one girl takes a risky shortcut with an adorable stranger, three friends set out to win a race to the Waffle House (and the hash brown spoils), and the fate of a teacup pig falls into the hands of a lovesick barista. A trio of today’s bestselling authors—John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle—brings all the magic of the holidays to life in three hilarious and charming interconnected tales of love, romance, and kisses that will steal your breath away. “A comedy as delicious as any whipped up by the Bard.” —Washington Post Book World

Author : Yu Hua
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307429797

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To Live by Yu Hua Pdf

Originally banned in China but later named one of that nation’s most influential books, a searing novel that portrays one man’s transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant. “A work of astounding emotional power.” —Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress From the author of Brothers and China in Ten Words: this celebrated contemporary classic of Chinese literature was also adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. After squandering his family’s fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Left with an ox as the companion of his final years, Fugui stands as a model of gritty authenticity, buoyed by his appreciation for life in this narrative of humbling power.

Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1895
Category : Electronic
ISBN : NYPL:33433040405494

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Ursule Mirouet by Honoré de Balzac Pdf

Author : Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2016-06-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781101974667

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Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz Pdf

Widely acclaimed as Naguib Mahfouz's best novel, Midaq Alley brings to life one of the hustling, teeming back alleys of Cairo in the 1940s. From Zaita the cripple-maker to Kirsha the hedonistic cafe owner, from Abbas the barber who mistakes greed for love to Hamida who sells her soul to escape the alley, from waiters and widows to politicians, pimps, and poets, the inhabitants of Midaq Alley vividly evoke Egypt's largest city as it teeters on the brink of change. Never has Nobel Prize-winner Mahfouz's talent for rich and luxurious storytelling been more evident than here, in his portrait of one small street as a microcosm of the world on the threshold of modernity.

Author : Han Shaogong
Publisher : Dial Press Trade Paperback
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2005-09-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780385339353

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A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Pdf

From the daring imagination of one of China’s greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originality–the story of a young man “displaced” to a small village in rural China during the 1960s. Told in the format of a dictionary, with a series of vignettes disguised as entries, A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel of bold invention–and a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. Entries trace the wisdom and absurdities of Maqiao: the petty squabbles, family grudges, poverty, infidelities, fantasies, lunatics, bullies, superstitions, and especially the odd logic in their use of language–where the word for “beginning” is the same as the word for “end”; “little big brother” means older sister; to be “scientific” means to be lazy; and “streetsickness” is a disease afflicting villagers visiting urban areas. Filled with colorful characters–from a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite him–A Dictionary of Maqiao is both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language.

Author : Bi Feiyu
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2010-08-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780547487335

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Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu Pdf

In a small village in China, the Wang family has produced seven sisters in its quest to have a boy; three of the sisters emerge as the lead characters in this remarkable novel. From the small-town treachery of the village to the slogans of the Cultural Revolution to the harried pace of city life, Bi Feiyu follows the women as they strive to change the course of their destinies and battle against an “infinite ocean of people” in a China that does not truly belong to them. Yumi will use her dignity, Yuxiu her powers of seduction, and Yuyang her ambition—all in an effort to take control of their world, their bodies, and their lives. Like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Three Sisters transports us to and immerses us in a culture we think we know but will understand much more fully by the time we reach the end. Bi’s Moon Opera was praised by the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. In one review Lisa See said: “I hope this is the first of many of Bi’s works to come to us.” Three Sisters fulfills that wish, with its irreplaceable portrait of contemporary Chinese life and indelible story of three tragic and sometimes triumphant heroines.

Author : Madeleine Thien
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 473 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-05-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780345810441

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Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien Pdf

Winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, this extraordinary novel tells the story of three musicians in China before, during and after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Madeleine Thien's new novel is breathtaking in scope and ambition even as it is hauntingly intimate. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations--those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century. With exquisite writing sharpened by a surprising vein of wit and sly humour, Thien has crafted unforgettable characters who are by turns flinty and headstrong, dreamy and tender, foolish and wise. At the centre of this epic tale, as capacious and mysterious as life itself, are enigmatic Sparrow, a genius composer who wishes desperately to create music yet can find truth only in silence; his mother and aunt, Big Mother Knife and Swirl, survivors with captivating singing voices and an unbreakable bond; Sparrow's ethereal cousin Zhuli, daughter of Swirl and storyteller Wen the Dreamer, who as a child witnesses the denunciation of her parents and as a young woman becomes the target of denunciations herself; and headstrong, talented Kai, best friend of Sparrow and Zhuli, and a determinedly successful musician who is a virtuoso at masking his true self until the day he can hide no longer. Here, too, is Kai's daughter, the ever-questioning mathematician Marie, who pieces together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking a fragile meaning in the layers of their collective story. With maturity and sophistication, humour and beauty, a huge heart and impressive understanding, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once beautifully intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of daily life inside China, yet transcendent in its universality.

Author : Brigid Pasulka
Publisher : HMH
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2009-08-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780547428475

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A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka Pdf

PEN/Hemingway Award Winner: A “gorgeous” novel weaving together stories of Poland past and present in one whimsically romantic epic (Chicago Tribune). On the eve of World War II, in a small Polish village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. To build a place in Anielica’s heart, he transforms her family’s modest hut into a beautiful home. But war arrives, cutting short their courtship and sending the young lovers off to the promise of a fresh start in Krakow. Nearly fifty years later, the couple’s granddaughter, Beata, repeats this journey, seeking a new life in the fairy-tale city of her grandmother’s stories. But instead of the rumored prosperity of the New Poland, she discovers a city full of frustrated youths, caught between its future and its past. Taken in by her tough-talking cousin, Irena, and her glamorous daughter, Magda, Beata struggles to find her own place in the world. But unexpected events—tragedies and miracles both—change lives and open eyes. “A whimsical debut,” (New York Times Book Review) A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True weaves together two remarkable stories, reimagining half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one unforgettable love affair. This magical, heartbreaking novel “rings hauntingly, enchantingly, real” (National Geographic Traveler). “With a touch of Marina Lewycka and a dash of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, this is storytelling that gets under your skin and forces you to press copies into your best friends’ hands.” —Elle (UK) “Funny and romantic like all the best true stories.” —Charlotte Mendelson, author of When We Were Bad