Reading "Balzac and the Little Seamstress"

I’ve been trying to read the bestseller “Balzac and the Little Seamstress” by Dai Saije, a writer who grew up in communist China and moved to France where he wrote the book. The plot was there with sufficient twists and turns to carry the story forward, and the writing did not lack descriptive power, but for some reason I could not stay with it. At first I thought perhaps it was because I needed a break from the genre of memoir-style writing or even stories about Asian life, but then I remembered reading recently a short story by Geoff Ryman called “Have or Not Have” which later became the opening chapter of the novel “Air”, a sci-fi story also involving an Asian seamstress. I loved the short story and ordered it from the library. So what is it that distinguishes one from the other for me, that I should be hooked by one but not the other?

The first thing that comes to me is the differences between the voices. Although both were narrated in the first person, and both by male writers, Balzac’s was a distinctly masculine, sombre and straight-forward voice to me, and Air feminine, light, and curvaceous. But I also love Hemingway’s voice which is masculine sombre, etc., and sometimes what seemed to me almost one of reporting, though he is always reflective even while reporting, and that is what Balzac did not do, at least not to me.

Reflective writing would, if I could have it ordered and delivered to my door, show me glimpses of the character(s) that may be brief yet incisive, something I could only have known had I been a fly on the wall of the innermost chambers of the character(s)’ physical or psychic space. Instead, I am allowed to follow along in the deepest of their shadows, watching events unfold from the recesses of their unconscious desires and motivations, feeling everything they feel from the inside, sometimes even before they do. But I, the reader, as emotionally and even spiritually entangled as I am now in the plot, can no more defy nor escape what fate awaits than the character(s) caught up in it. My heart and my spirit are lost to the story, and the fire of my own being is stoked through (re)living this piece of the bigger story of creation. For all human stories are creation stories, even Balzac and the Little Seamstress, though I would only give it 2 flames out of 5.