Flashes

In 1968, Mao Zedong launched a campaign to change China. As part of the cultural revolution, the universities were closed. A program started in 1957 to re-educate petty thieves and smaller offenders by sending them to the countryside was extended to all young people representing "intelligentsia" and they were also sent as far as possible from their homes to be re-educated by "poor peasants". They had to do hard manual work in primitive conditions for two or three years, and this could still be extended by one year. The re-education program was only officially ended in 2013.  Dai Sijie's Balzac and Little Chinese Seamstress (184 pages) is based on the author's own experiences; he spent three years at a re-education camp near Sichuan. Sijie, whose parents were medical professors, managed to return (by the book, the odds for this were 3/1000) and studied to become a teacher. In 1984, he moved to France to study cinematography and afterwards successfully worked...

Before I chose Banana Yoshimoto 's Kitchen (150 pages) as my next thin book, I read Fran ç oise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse  (130 pages), which happened to be in our library in English, to see if it was worthy.  Sagan wrote the book when she was 17. It tells about a girl called Cécile of the same age (and very much like the writer herself). She is a kind of socialite with a widowed playboy father who is loved by two beautiful women competing over his affection. Cécile is extroverted and has a natural social talent for reading visual cues of facial expressions, gestures, and reactions. She is used to doing what she wants - partying, drinking, sailing, driving and ignoring her studies. When her father decides to marry one of two women and the chosen one begins to control Cécile's life, she starts manipulating people close to her to destroy her father's marriage plans. This ultimately has tragic consequences and makes her enter the world of tristesse , something her superfi...

I am not a great fan of book clubs. When reading becomes a duty, it starts resembling homework. Ideally, reading a book should be free of time limits and deadlines. It is a unique encounter between the reader and the writer and should be savoured like a meeting with a good friend. However, I have dreamed of starting a thin book club as there are many great books of ca. 100 pages or at least less than 200. It is time to make this dream into reality in this limited context. I call it a book club only in lack of any other suitable term and would like to think of it as a club for the thin books themselves rather than the readers. Thin books are easy to keep with you and read anywhere - in a cafe, in the park, on the beach, at the dentist's office while waiting for your turn. Also, a threshold for reading (and rereading) a thin book is much lower than that of a thick book. Hence, I have for years kept my eyes open for thought-provoking thin books.  One of them is Stefan Zweig 's Ch...