In it, Dai Sijie draws on his own experience as a young man being re-educated during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to tell the story of two boys who have been labelled “young intellectuals” and deemed potential reactionaries.

The sons of bourgeois pigs, the two boys grew up together and are both sent to a rural village on Pheonix Mountain. Having been taken from their bourgeois pig parents, they are made to live in a house above an actual pig sty. The smell is apparently awful. Because the book is told as a first-person narrative, we never get a lot of details about the speaker. We find out in a kind of off-handed way that his name means “horse,” though, which means his name is Ma. His companion, the one who does not narrate, is Luo, and their adventures on the mountain are numerous. They frequently revolve around the boys’ search for entertainment but, for a while, focus specifically on Luo’s desire to get some strange out of a tailor’s daughter, the cutest girl on the mountain. Their shared enemy in their pursuits is the village Headman, a staunch Maoist who appears to hate fun of all kinds.

One day, the boys managed to convince the Headman that they should be allowed to visit a neighboring village and watch a movie that was being shown there. No one in the Headman’s village had ever seen a movie, and everyone wanted to know what they were like. The condition for the boys’ departure was that they return in two days and recount the movie in perfect detail. They made the trip and watched the film twice. Thanks to Luo’s genius at storytelling, the Headman made their trip a monthly ritual. Finally, the boys had a job that didn’t involve working in a mine. This was how the two passed their time for a while. Ma had a violin, which he played in the evening, and when the two weren’t working in the mines, they were putting on an aural cinema. Then, the Seamstress fell for Luo. From this point on, Luo disappears sporadically, and it is always assumed he is enjoying a rendezvous with the his new lover. Then, almost as though the story must complete the book’s title, Ma gets his hands on some Balzac. Another young intellectual has smuggled forbidden books onto the mountain, and Ma obtains the boy’s copy of Ursule Mirouet. The book, of course translated into Mandarin, gives his spirit the release he’s been looking for.

While Ma’s quest becomes to obtain more books from the stingy smuggler, Luo realizes that he is dissatisfied with his conquest of the Seamstress because she seems too parochial for his taste. To make himself feel better about banging some chick he met in the country, Luo decides to use Ma’s books to educate her. On their liaisons, his ritual becomes first to make love to her and then to read to her from these exotic Western novels. The ending is something I honestly didn’t see coming.

Sijie eventually made his story into a film that I’d love to see. This is a novel that rides on the strength of its story and the simplicity of its telling. There aren’t huge explosions. There are few scenes of suspense or horror. Some of the best fun for me was encountering the names of classic novels mentioned in the smuggler’s collection. I recommend it to anyone. It’s a relaxing read that won’t turn your brain to mush.