Word: balzacs
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...town of Yong Jing in northern China is "so small that when the local canteen prepared a dish of beef and onions the smell reached the nose of every single inhabitant." And the 17-year-old narrator of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Knopf; 197 pages) and his friend Luo, 18, city youths from Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, are dispatched to a small village so remote it is a long day's journey from Yong Jing. It is 1971, midway during the Cultural Revolution, and they are the unwitting - and unwilling - assignees to a program of re-education through...
...plants Trujillo securely in his time and place, but the book's dictator also crosses temporal and physical boundaries to remind us that tyranny remains the source of Latin America's best fiction. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, The Feast of the Goat confirms Balzac's observation that the novel is the private history of nations...
...town of Yong Jing in Northern China is "so small that when the local canteen prepared a dish of beef and onions the smell reached the nose of every single inhabitant." And the 17-year-old narrator of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Knopf; 197 pages) and his friend Luo, 18, city youths from Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, are dispatched to a small village so remote it is a long day's journey from Yong Jing. It is 1971, midway during the Cultural Revolution, and they are the unwitting?and unwilling?assignees to a program of re-education through...
...novel's catchy title, aptly describing the burden of the plot, derives from a volume of Balzac containing Ursule Mirouet wheedled out of the hidden cache of a fellow re-educatee in a nearby village. The book becomes as cherished as any work of Dickens in Waugh's A Handful of Dust. For when Luo reads and then retells the story to a dazzling but illiterate Chinese seamstress, she falls in idyllic love with both him and Balzac. Youthful passions reign, and the lovers and the narrator find themselves beset with the ultimate woe of literary teenage coupling: pregnancy...
...London, where a Polish emigre named Joseph Conrad has just published, in successive years, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Conrad is coming in at the end of the full flowering of Victorian literature--in the last half-century, Eliot (George, not T.S.), Hardy, Henry James, Zola, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, Twain, Melville, Trollope, Tennyson and countless others have been busy penning new works. And with the arrival of the 1900s, our well-travelled Rudolph will soon be able to read new works by Dreiser, Cather, Wharton and Kipling--and then Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, and eventually Paris's own bard...