Dai Sijie has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 1 narrator, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 8 ratings. The most-rated is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Summary
At the height of Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for "re-education." The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of the Phoenix mountains, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down the precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin - and, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening, and the magical power of storytelling.
©2001 Dai Sijie (P)2002 Random House Inc., Random House Audio, a Division of Random House Inc.
Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise
Summary
"Nous nous approchâmes de la valise. Elle était ficelée par une grosse corde de paille tressée, nouée en croix. Nous la débarrassâmes de ses liens, et l'ouvrîmes silencieusement. À l'intérieur, des piles de livres s'illuminèrent sous notre torche électrique ; les grands écrivains occidentaux nous accueillirent à bras ouverts : à leur tête, se tenait notre vieil ami Balzac, avec cinq ou six romans, suivi de Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Rousseau, Tolstoï, Gogol, Dostoïevski, et quelques Anglais : Dickens, Kipling, Emily Brontë... Quel éblouissement ! Il referma la valise et, posant une main dessus, comme un chrétien prêtant serment, il me déclara "Avec ces livres, je vais transformer la Petite Tailleuse. Elle ne sera plus jamais une simple montagnarde.""
©2000 Editions Gallimard (P)2008 Editions Gallimard
Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
Summary
Following his runaway best seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie gives us a delightful new tale of East meets West: an adventure both wry and uplifting about a love of dreams and the dream of love, and the power of reading to sustain and inspire the spirit. After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalysis to 21st-century China. But it is his hidden purpose, to liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisoner, that leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl. Muo's quest will take him from a Chengdu mortuary to a rural panda habitat, from an insane asylum to the haunts of the marauding Lolo people. Along the way, he will lose a tooth, his virginity, and his once unshakable faith in psychoanalytic insight. But his quixotic idealism will not waver, even as he comes to see that the chivalrous heart may have room for more than one true love. Dai Sijie's exuberant, touching, and most unlikely, romance is a triumph of unbridled imagination, a celebration of the yearning spirit.
©2005 Dai Sijie (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.