There are a few weeks remaining before summer’s end. Here are suggestions for off-hours reading — several outstanding books, newly published and golden oldies.
Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamtress (translated from the French; Anchor Books, 2002) is an extraordinary, near perfect novel, slight of size. Sijie explores the power of books, friendship, and awakening sexuality in telling the story of two Chinese teenagers sent to the countryside for re-education from their urban homes. Re-education takes a delicious, often humorous turn after the young men introduce a local seamstress to their favorite novels. Dai Sijie was born in China. At the age of thirty he left for France, where he has worked as a filmmaker.
In The Alice Network (Wm. Morrow, 2017) Kate Quinn creates a world of female spies in World War I with a parallel story of disappearance during World War II. It is historical fiction based on the true life of Louise de Bettignies (codename Alice). Some readers will not be enthralled by the parallel WW II story.
In The Barefoot Woman (translated from French; Archilelago Books, 2008), a memoir, Scholastique Mukasongas, like Kate Quinn, gives us — in a non-fiction text- another story of an intrepid woman. Stefania, Mukasongas’s mother — lovingly, daringly shelters her several children in the face of the Hutu slaughter of Tutis. This small book is a beautifully written encomium to Stefania, a powerful “work of memory” by a daughter who was able to escape to France.
Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (Grove Press, 2020) considers a childhood quite different from Mukasongas’s, one is which a child tries to protect and save his mother from her worst instincts. An astonishing first novel-autobiographical, winner of the Booker prize, Shuggie Bain is set in 1980s Glascow, the Thatcher years. It is a moving coming of age story, suspenseful in the zigs and zags of Shuggie’s taking charge of his life and destiny.
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