It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well-dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.
…from Dai Sijie‘s magnificent first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which is markedly better than his second novel, and a completely different animal than his horrific third publication, which I’m not quite certain you can call a novel, and is one of only a half dozen books I’ve ever quit reading in my entire life. Yet…little Chinese seamstress…that’s as beautiful as anything ever written.
