User:Corgilove81/sandbox

Plot Summary
The novel Article 5 is set in the southeastern United States. The backstory tells of a war that changes America and leads to the implementing of the Federal Bureau of Reformation, also known as the Moral Militia,  and a complete upheaval of the Bill of Rights, leaving the Moral Statues. Also in the backstory, there are details about Ember Miller, a 17-year-old girl living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Chase Jennings, an FBR soldier and Ember’s previous love interest. The inciting incident is when Ember and her mother are taken away for noncompliance with Article 5, which “pertain[s] to children conceived out of wedlock”. Ember and her mother are separated, and Ember is sent to the Girls Reformatory and Rehabilitation Center of West Virginia, where they send all female minors involved in breaking the Moral Statutes. While at the reformatory, Ember feels that she “has to get out of [t]here and find [her] mother.” So, with the help of Rebecca’s boyfriend, Ember tries, unsuccessfully, to escape and is taken to a torture room. Meanwhile, Chase has a personal goal: to keep Ember safe. Chase breaks Ember out of the rehabilitation center; they both run away to Virginia to find the person who will transport them to a safehouse, where Ember’s mom is supposed to be. When they reach the carrier’s house, the man who was supposed to transport them is shot by the FBR. Just before he dies, he tells Ember and Chase of a carrier in West Virginia, and Chase and Ember head off to the next carrier. Later in the narrative, Ember saves a farmer’s son from poachers, and are both invited to an awkward dinner. After dinner, Ember and Chase go upstairs, and Chase kisses Ember. While they are upstairs, the farmer secretly calls the FBR to turn in Chase, who is now an AWOL soldier and Ember, a runaway. When Ember overhears a discussion about the phone call, the two characters leave as soon as possible. Later in the plot, they come across people and hear that there is a carrier and a “a whole underground system” in Knoxville who will take them to a safehouse, so the two start towards their home town.

Character List

 * Ember Miller, the main character, goes on a journey to rescue her mother from the FBR. She is a seventeen-year-old girl whose “eyes [are] big and brown. . . and [her] nose [is] slightly crooked.” It is mentioned that she and Chase have had a romantic relationship when they were younger.


 * Chase Jennings, an old neighbor and former romantic interest of Ember’s, is now an FBR soldier who goes AWOL to keep Ember safe and get her to a safehouse. He is tall, tanned, knowledgeable, and street smart. During his training he is asked to kill Lori Whittman, but refuses.


 * Sean Banks is a character that before joining and bringing Ember to the Knoxville resistance, helps in Embers attempt to jump over the reformatory wall. He has “light brown hair and [a] narrow build.” He is in an illicit relationship with Rebecca Lansing and he helps Ember to escape from the detention center.
 * Tucker Morris, an ambitious FBR soldier who hates Chase, assists in arresting Ember and trades information about Rebecca’s whereabouts for being able to touch Ember's body. He has green eyes and violent tendencies.  He shoots and kills Lori Whittman.
 * Beth, Ember's best friend, is from Knoxville, Tennessee, and is a red-headed, tall girl.
 * Ryan, described as a practical boy from Ember’s hometown, is in a relationship with Beth.

Love
One of the major themes in the novel is love.

Survival
One of the major themes in Article 5 is survival.

Plot Summary
The story of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie begins with the information that the protagonist, who is “a fine musician,” and his friend Luo, “a genius for storytelling,” have parents that are both enemies of the state during the Cultural Revolution of China. The protagonist’s parents are classified as such because, as provincial doctors, they are seen as “stinking scientific authorities.” Luo’s father is an enemy of the state because he is a dentist who has told people that he fixed the teeth of Mao Zedong, the leader of the revolution, and saying so is seen as disrespect towards the Chairman. Mao has recently implemented the re-education program, in which city-bred people are sent to be “re-educated by the poor peasants” in order to become better citizens of the new state, and to forget their past learning.

The inciting incident of this “classic boy-meets-girl" novel is when the protagonist and Luo, both city youths, arrive at the mountain called “Phoenix of the Sky” to be “re-educat[ed] through labor” . When the village headman starts to be curious about films that the pair has seen in the past, the characters are asked, as part of their re-education duties, to see films in the city and retell them to the entire village, “and make [their] story last exactly as long as the screen version” . The two are grateful for the break from work while they watch the films. One day, when returning to their village from seeing a film, they find their friend Four-Eyes, a clumsy man who is the son of two writers, blind without his characteristic glasses.  Luo and the protagonist agree to help him with his work in exchange for one of his books forbidden by Chinese law that he keeps locked away in a suitcase. This exchange is how the two characters receive their first book, Ursule Mirouët by Honoré de Balzac. After Luo stays up all night reading the book, he gives the book to the protagonist and leaves the village in order to tell it to the Little Seamstress, “the region’s reigning beauty" that both characters are attracted to, and the protagonist becomes “completely wrapped up in the French story.” When Luo returns, he is carrying leaves from the tree that he and the former virgin, the Little Seamstress, had sex under.

The character of Luo is then motivated to educate the Little Seamstress and “ma[k]e her more refined, more cultured.” This motivation spurs the protagonist and Luo to steal the rest of the books from Four-Eyes’ home, “knowing that [Four-Eyes] will be afraid to call the authorities.” After their successful robbery, the protagonist recites the tale of The Count of Monte Cristo in his cabin to Luo and the visiting tailor. The village headman, described as a passionate Communist who has just returned from an unsuccessful dental surgery, threatens to turn in Luo and the protagonist for spreading the counter-revolutionary ideas found in The Count of Monte Cristo if they don’t agree to fix the headman’s teeth. Faced with the threat of prison, the pair fix the village headmans teeth, but they operate the drill “slowly. . . to punish him.” Later, when the headman is calmer and thankful to the two for repairing his teeth, he allows Luo to leave the village for two months to look after Luo’s ailing mother. Before he leaves, Luo asks the protagonist to guard the Little Seamstress, and the protagonist happily obliges.

During Luo’s absence, the Little Seamstress concludes that she is pregnant. Her character confides this in the protagonist, for “when [Luo] had left the previous month she was not yet worried” about missing her period. However, since it is illegal to have children out of wedlock in the revolutionary society, and her and Luo are too young to marry, the protagonist must set up a secret abortion. Three months after the abortion is performed and Luo returns, the Little Seamstress has adopted the city accent in her speech and is wearing clothes that “would only be worn by a woman in the city.” The Little Seamstress “comes to understand her own sexual power,” and runs away from Phoenix of the Sky to “change her life and try her chances in the city,” without a word to her father or friends before she decides to leave. In his grief, Luo becomes inebriated and burns all of the foreign books “in [a] frenzy,” ending the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

Characters

 * The Protagonist, a seventeen-year-old violin player, is banished to Phoenix of the Sky for re-education with his friend and neighbor Luo. He enjoys the Western books that he receives from Four-Eyes greatly and is attracted instantly to The Little Seamstress, despite Luo’s relationship with her.  He procures an abortion for her when Luo is visiting his mother.


 * Luo, an eighteen-year-old who has a talent for storytelling, is the one who comes up with the idea of trading one of Four-Eyes’ books for labor. He reads novels by Balzac to The Little Seamstress in order to educate her.  He takes away her virginity and impregnates her, and after she leaves, he burns every one of the forbidden books that he and the protagonist own.


 * “The Little Seamstress” is a young woman with "an impressive, sensual beauty” who “sparkles because she’s curious [and] funny." She is impregnated by Luo, and subsequently gets an abortion. She learns from Balzac’s writings, eventually running off to the city to start a new life.
 * “Four-Eyes,” Luo’s and the protagonist’s friend who is living in another village, has a suitcase of forbidden books that are all stolen from him by Luo and the the protagonist. Four-Eyes has spectacles and bulging eyes, and is able to leave the re-education program after he is hired at a newspaper.
 * The Village Headman, a fifty-year-old “ex-opium farmer turned Communist cadre,” threatens to turn the two main characters in to the police after he hears them read a forbidden Western book.
 * The Tailor, The Little Seamstress’ father and a rich and popular man, is the only tailor on the mountain. He is old but energetic, widely travelled, and is very entertained by the story of The Count of Monte Cristo.
 * The Gynaecologist, a man around 40 years old with “grizzled lanky hair [and] sharp features,” performs the Little Seamstress’ illegal abortion in return for a book by Honoré de Balzac.

Power of Education and Literature
Critics have noted that Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress deals with the strength of education and literature. Jeff Zaleski of Publishers Weekly said that the novel “emphasize[s] the power of literature to free the mind.” Additionally, a New York Times book review by Brooke Allen addresses the themes, such as the “potency of imaginative literature and why it is hated and feared by those who wish to control others.” This reviewer addresses the evil and ultimate failure of “any system that fears knowledge and education. . . and closes the mind to moral and intellectual truth”as well.

Friendship and Lost Innocence
The major themes of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress include friendship and lost innocence.

Double Edges
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress addresses issues such as how everything appears to have a double-edge.

Cultural Superiority
It has been noted that Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress deals with cultural superiority.

Style
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is notable for its size. Publishers Weekly stated that Balzac was a “slim first novel,” and Brooke Allen at the New York Times Book Review called the narrative “streamlined." Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is written in a characteristic style. The novel focuses and “accents on a soft center rather than . . . hard edges” according to Josh Greenfield of Time Europe. A vast majority of the characters in the narrative have “epithets rather than names,” adding to the relaxed writing style of the novel.

Cultural Revolution
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is during the time known as the Cultural Revolution in China, and this historical event helped to supply the framework for many of the conflicts faced in the novel. The Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong “began in 1966 and continued until the dictator’s death ten years later." The Cultural Revolution in China was “intended to stamp out the educated class and . . . old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” In order to do this, “hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals [were sent] to peasant villages for re-education,” and within the years of “1968-1975, some twelve million youths were ‘rusticated.’”

Dai Sijie's Past
Dai Sijie’s own experiences during this time period helped to produce the novel. Sijie himself was re-educated, and “spent the years between 1971 and 1974 in the mountains of Sichuan Province,” and emigrated to France in 1984.

Publication History
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has been translated from the original language. The novel was first published in France in the French language" in 2000, and since then, rights of the book have been sold in nineteen countries. However, the novel has not been translated to Chinese because of statements that Sijie has “ blackened the characters of the peasants and treated them like idiots,” and that the changes that the characters go through should be “the result of reading a Chinese book." The English translation of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Ina Rilke is published by the company Knopf and has been praised for its clarity.”

Reception
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress received reviews related to “warmth and humor." It has been stated as well that the novel “abound[s] in gentle humor, warm bonhomie and appealing charm” in Time Europe.

The novel has likewise been seen as an emotional tale. Jeff Zaleski has reviewed Balzac as a “moving, [and] often wrenching short novel." Dai Sijie has been praised as a “captivating, amazing, storyteller” whose writing in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is “seductive and unaffected.” In a San Jose Mercury News article, the novel is described as one that will resonate with you.

Topics in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress having to do with the Cultural Revolution have been elaborated on and reviewed. Dai Sijie, as “an entertaining recorder of China’s ‘ten lost years,’” addresses the Cultural Revolution. Balzac is seen by some as “a wonderfully human tale,” and relatable. The ending of the novel has received some positive attention. The ending has a “smart surprising bite” says a Library Journal article. In Publishers Weekly, the conclusion is described as “unexpected, droll, and poignant.” Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is seen as an unprecedented story, “not another grim. . . tale of forced labor." Balzac is a popular novel as well. It has been described as “a cult novel." and was a bestseller in France in the year 2000.” However, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has received negative reviews. Brooke Allen of The New York Times Book Review states that the novel is “worthwhile, but unsatisfactory” and that the epithets for most of the characters “work against the material's power.” In addition, the Chinese government has complained that Sijie “is mocking the nations great revolution."

Awards and Nominations
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is the winner of several literary awards. The novel is “the winner of five French literary prizes." Additionally, Sijie won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Balzac. Among consumers, the novel was a best seller in 2000.”

Adaptations
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has been turned into a “French-language film.” The author of the novel, Dai Sijie, has “adapted it as a screenplay, and directed” the film as well.