Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Two city boys are sent to a remote mountain village for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. They discover a suitcase of banned Western literature — Balzac, Flaubert, Dumas — and read it in secret, then read it to the seamstress they both love. Dai Sijie writes about forbidden books as contraband that changes the people who touch it — that gives the seamstress ideas about herself that the village cannot contain. The most P&P book on the China shelf: a dispatch about what literature does when the state decides it is dangerous, and what happens to the people it liberates.