Dai Sijie

DIRECTOR Dai Sijie and his crew drove two hours on treacherous mountain trails in China's Sichuan province to arrive at their filming location each day, sometimes using dynamite to blast away boulders that had fallen overnight.Up a set of stairs carved into a rock face was a lakeside village barely touched by modernization. There were no showers or refrigerators, and the only contact with the outside world came via the few satellite dishes that dotted the pristine landscape.

DIRECTOR Dai Sijie and his crew drove two hours on treacherous mountain trails in China's Sichuan province to arrive at their filming location each day, sometimes using dynamite to blast away boulders that had fallen overnight.Up a set of stairs carved into a rock face was a lakeside village barely touched by modernization. There were no showers or refrigerators, and the only contact with the outside world came via the few satellite dishes that dotted the pristine landscape.

East uneasily meets West in both of Dai Sijie's fanciful novels. In his debut work, "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," two teenage boys sentenced to be "reeducated" in a remote mountain village during the Cultural Revolution discover and then delight in a suitcase full of banned European fiction. In his second book, "Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch," the title character -- "a Chinese-born apprentice in psychoanalysis recently returned from France" -- himself has imported forbidden materials.

East uneasily meets West in both of Dai Sijie's fanciful novels. In his debut work, "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," two teenage boys sentenced to be "reeducated" in a remote mountain village during the Cultural Revolution discover and then delight in a suitcase full of banned European fiction. In his second book, "Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch," the title character -- "a Chinese-born apprentice in psychoanalysis recently returned from France" -- himself has imported forbidden materials.

*--* SO. CAL. RATING Fiction *--* *--* 1 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Anchor Books: $10) Literary light in a communist village 2 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (HarperPaperbacks: $13.95) Opera mingles with mayhem in South America 3 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Picador: $15) A Midwestern family unravels at the 20th century's end 4 The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Picador: $13) Three women linked across time by Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway."