Critics' choices for Christmas

It is no easy task to narrow down to three a list of books for holiday gift giving. I chose these because they are the ones I seem to recommend most frequently to friends and colleagues.

Set in a remote mountain village during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Anchor Books, $10, 184 pp.) is the story of two teenage city boys torn from their aristocratic families and banished to the countryside for re-education. The surroundings are dismal; the work they must perform--carrying buckets of excrement up terraced mountain slopes for use as fertilizer--disgusting. The boys are lonely, tormented by peasants (who constantly remind them that they are now members of the proletariat), and fearful of what will become of their parents.

Life takes a turn for the better when they discover a trunkful of banned Western classics in Chinese translation and encounter the daughter of the local tailor. Suddenly, the re-educated become the educators, wooing the Little Seamstress with Balzac in an attempt to civilize this enticing little bumpkin. As love blossoms, the boys find respite from their drab surroundings.

Author Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954 and was himself "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974. In a mere 184 pages, Sijie has written a fable that deftly describes the spiritual futility of the Cultural Revolution, and the redemptive power of love, art, and friendship.

Short fable, meet sprawling epic. Don't be put off by the page count of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (HarperPerennial, $21, 1,474 pp.), which I recommend any chance I get. The setting is India in the early 1950s, a time of considerable turmoil for the newly independent nation. Unrest swirls in the Mehra household as Mrs. Rupa Mehra attempts to find a suitable husband for her well-educated and independent-minded daughter, Lata. Mehra is not yet over the untimely death of her own husband, a midlevel employee of the Railway Service who apparently died of overwork. Without the financial means to secure the best possible match for her daughter, Mehra must come to terms with diminished expectations.

The novel, which begins and ends with a wedding, centers around four families: the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, all Hindu, and the Khans, whose son has stolen Lata's heart, and who are (gasp) Muslim. On one level, A Suitable Boy is a book about manners. But, in a broader sense, it is really about India itself (former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is a cameo) and the tensions of a multiethnic nation working toward self-determination. If Mehra can't yet accept her daughter's love for the dashing Hassan Khan, how can one expect the Indian government to reconcile Muslim-Hindu conflict in Kashmir?

Despite the epic nature of this book, and a list of characters and plot twists to rival any Dickens novel, A Suitable Boy is amazingly easy to follow, even for someone, like myself, not well-versed in Indian history and geography. I had to refer only a few times to the four family trees that Seth provides--a tribute to his skill.

Because I'm less comfortable writing about poetry than about prose, I hesitated to include this stunning collection, except that I seem unable to stop myself from recommending it. Miracle Maker: The Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions, $14.95, 140 pp.) should have been required reading for anyone planning to vote (or run for president) in November. Amid images of screaming insurgents and car bombings, it's easy to forget that Iraq has had a long, rich cultural heritage. As recently as the 1970s, Kirkuk and Baghdad were home to a flourishing avant-garde movement.

Al-Azzawi is among the Arab world's leading experimental poets. As one of the founders of a group called the Sixties Generation of poets, he openly, and relatively freely, protested against the Iraqi government's antidemocratic stance. (Look to the book's introduction for invaluable historical and critical context.) By the 1970s, though, the Baathists began to clamp down on dissenters, prohibiting their magazines and literary journals and imprisoning writers. After a period in jail, Al-Azzawi fled with his wife to East Germany. They have never returned to Iraq. The poems in this collection mirror Al-Azzawi's journey from youthful, idealistic protestor to the despair, and ultimately, wise detachment of the exile. Al-Azzawi's poetry is at once technically beautiful, terrifying, and uplifting. In his poem "The Opening," Al-Azzawi confesses:

  I do nothing well except write
     poems

  Because I came to sing of
     mankind and to write its
     sadness.

That he has done so, and continues to do so, is a blessing.

Clare Collins Gunther is grants manager for the Arts and Cultural Council for Greater Rochester (New York).

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