Lexile = 1100 (guess)
What do you know about the cultural revolution in China? I think the best way to learn about history is through great historical fiction. In this novel translated from the French, Two urban Chinese boys, 17 and 18 when the story starts, are sent to a farming village to do rural work as part of their “re-education” under Mao’s cultural revolution. Their terms are indefinite because their parents, doctors and dentists, were considered bourgeois enemies of the people.
The author was himself “re-educated” in China between 1971 and 1974 and has lived in France since 1984. All the universities were closed and all boys and girls who had graduated from high school were sent off. Math, physics and chemistry were dropped from the school curriculum and replaced by agricultural and industrial texts.
The work the boys do is brutal farm work, done by all the peasants in this village. But then they steal a trove of forbidden western books – Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Kipling, Bronte and Melville. There’s some romance when both boys fall in love with the tailor’s daughter, the seamstress. With the brutal lives of the peasants as background, the real theme is the enlightenment that comes from reading and how it can change lives.
This book was made into a movie in 2011. Watch a trailer HERE.
**This summary was (mostly) copied from a post written by Jim Fonseca on Goodreads.
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