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The Crazed

By Ha Jin

(10)

| Paperback | 9781400032143

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Book Description

Since the appearance of his first book of stories in English, Ha Jin has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and garnered comparisons to Dickens, Balzac, and Isaac Babel. “Like Babel,” wrote Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review, “Ha Jin observContinue

Since the appearance of his first book of stories in English, Ha Jin has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and garnered comparisons to Dickens, Balzac, and Isaac Babel. “Like Babel,” wrote Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review, “Ha Jin observes everything . . . yet he tells the reader only—and precisely—as much as is needed to make his deceptively simple fiction resonate on many levels.”

In his luminous new novel, the author of Waiting deepens his portrait of contemporary Chinese society while exploring the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal. Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature at a provincial university, has had a stroke, and his student Jian Wan—who is also engaged to Yang’s daughter—has been assigned to care for him. What at first seems a simple if burdensome duty becomes treacherous when the professor begins to rave: pleading with invisible tormentors, denouncing his family, his colleagues, and a system in which a scholar is “just a piece of meat on a cutting board.”

Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? And can the dutiful Jian avoid being irretrievably compromised? For in a China convulsed by the Tiananmen uprising, those who hear the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it. At once nuanced and fierce, earthy and humane, The Crazed is further evidence of Ha Jin’s prodigious narrative gifts.

Critics

  • Voice of the demon-monster

    The Crazed by Ha Jin 323pp, Heinemann, £12.99 Novelists of the Chinese diaspora work under a double yoke. First they must satisfy the demands of a western readership eager for tales of the human tragedy of their homeland's 20th century; then they mus ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Out of the bottom drawer?

    Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin's earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who ... (read full critics)

    spectator published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  • I started to read this book since 2005 when I did a language exchange with Philip Silverman, a retired anthropology professor. The LE lasted only for one month. Now and then I will pick up this book again and continue to read it.

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    Jon Stark said on Jun 29, 2009 | Add your feedback

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