Nevertheless, there is a "moral." Not only is the author himself telling a story that features classic storytellers of the past. The boys, too, manage to survive on account of their story-telling ability. They begin by going to the nearby town to watch North Korean movies, then returning and relating the plots to the locals. As this provides the only entertainment the village knows, the time thus spent is considered as a legitimate part of the boys' revolutionary labor.
Later they embark on the more risky enterprise of relating the stories of the French novels they have been reading. This is a far more ambitious project, and only selected individuals benefit from it. One of them is the young and all too impressionable seamstress.
So if you want to take this book seriously, and there's no reason at all why you should, then you can argue that it's a paean to the art of storytelling on a number of different levels. The moral, then, would be that the human need for fiction and the imagination in general is what finally proves the undoing of the Marxist intellectual's intransigent cultural materialism.
Of course, nothing so grand, or so theoretical, appears in the easy-going, genial pages of this would-be bestseller. There are incidental felicities that make you think the author has one eye, if not both, on an eventual film (he is described in the blurb as being a filmmaker).
This book is scarcely the masterpiece its publishers would like us to believe. Its weakness is that it is too sentimental. There are no horrors on show here, though there were plenty going on in the period depicted.
Nevertheless it is easy reading, benign, and neatly executed, and the English translation, by Ina Rilke, is flawless and exceptionally natural.
The book is also quietly witty. One of the boys brings a violin from the city and, as the villagers prepare to smash it as a bourgeois toy, he offers to play it. What's the song called, the headman asks. Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao, says his friend, quick as a flash. Everyone nods in approval, and the violin is saved.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
By Dai Sijie
172 pages
Chatto & Windus
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