Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress

2 young neighbor/friends are sent to a remote village during the cultural revolution to be educated. They fall in love with a young seamstress. She runs off in the end...

This book is Hollywood as Hell. It's a Hogan's Heroes version of a Chinese reeducation camp, complete with wacky scheming and a complete glossing over of any sort of harsh realism. The book features a trite view of reeducation: those who are supposed to be reeducated are actually the ones who end up doing the reeducation. It's the same sort of bland, thoughtless plot that plagues so many mediocre indie and foreign films. Combine that with a cliched and unimaginative view of canonical art, a dreadful third act, and a completely unnecessary temporary shift in narrative voice, and you get an awful, awful book. The only redeeming feature of this novel is that it's less than 200 pages long, so at least I only wasted and hour or so of my life reading it.