Synopses & Reviews
From the author of the runaway best seller
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a delightful new tale of East meets West, an adventure both wry and uplifting, about a love of dreams and the dream of love, and the power of reading to sustain and inspire the spirit.
After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalysis to 21st-century China. But it is his hidden purpose to liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisoner that leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl.
Muo's quest will take him from a Chengdu mortuary to a rural panda habitat, from an insane asylum to the haunts of the marauding Lola people. Along the way, he will lose a tooth, his virginity, and his once unshakable faith in psychoanalytic insight. But his quixotic idealism will not waver, even as he comes to see that the chivalrous heart may have room for more than one true love.
Dai Sijie's exuberant, touching and most unlikely romance is a triumph of unbridled invention, a celebration of the yearning spirit.
Review
"It's also not quite as satisfying as the author's sparkling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, though Balzac lovers will enjoy the perfectly crafted prose and sense of the absurd." Library Journal
Review
"Muo a little like Nabokov's Pnin and the protagonists of Naipaul's early novels is a charmer. But Sijie's latest is a very rickety construction. Nevertheless, it will very probably be another reading group sensation." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
From the author of the runaway best seller "Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress" comes a delightful new tale of East meets West, an adventure both wry and uplifting, about a love of dreams and the dream of love.
About the Author
Dai Sijie is a Chinese-born filmmaker and novelist who has lived and worked in France since 1984. His first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was an overnight sensation; it spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.