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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Author: Dai Sijie Published by Alfred A. Knopf Translated from the French by Ina Rilke Written: 2000 (English 2001) Publisher: Anchor Books Length: 197 pages In these two weeks, I finished the rest two parts of the book. I read the commentaries printed on the back of the book, and there was a sentence criticized by Michael Dirda from Washington Post Book World which I considered to be so appropriate to describe the book--"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is basically a romance, a novel about the power of art to enlarge our imaginations, no matter what the circumstances." Though the book was not an exciting one, it just somehow attracted me a lot.. I guess that's the reason why I didn't give up reading. At the end of the book, the Little Seamstress left the village because she wanted to go to the city to search for the new life, and she said she had learned one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price. I agree what the Little Seamstress said. A woman's beauty is a fleeting thing which could disappear after a short period, especially in a woman's youth, and that's why it is worth treasuring. When I was reading the book, I used to skip the vocabularies I didn't know but marked them as new words and went on with my reading, trying to understand the sentences without a dictionary. After my daily reading was finished, I would use few minutes to look them up in the dictionary. For every book, I know that there must be some inner meanings inside them, but when I read an English novel, I find it hard to catch the meanings in the book, not to mention expressing them. Maybe I should find some information to help me know more about the book. 49777099 張耀真