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Summary
Summary
"In his 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 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?"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 and is now a professor of English at Emory University. He is author of, among other works, two short-story collections: Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999.
He lives in Atlanta.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
On the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Jian Wan, the narrator of Ha Jin's powerful new novel, comes upon two weeping students. "I'm going to write a novel to fix all the fascists on the page," says one of them. The other responds, "yes... we must nail them to the pillory of history." Ha's novel is written in the conviction that writers don't nail anyone to anything: at best, they escape nailing themselves. Jian is a graduate student in literature at provincial Shanning University. In the spring of 1989, his adviser, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke, and Jian listens as the bedridden Yang raves about his past. Yang's bitterness about his life under the yoke of the Communist Party infects Jian, who decides to withdraw from school. His fiance Professor Yang's daughter, Meimei breaks off their engagement in disgust, but Jian is heartened by a trip into the countryside, after which he decides that he will devote himself to helping the province's impoverished peasants. His plan is to become a provincial official, but the Machiavellian maneuverings of the Party secretary of the literature department a sort of petty Madame Mao cheat him of this dream, sending him off on a hapless trip to Beijing and Tiananmen Square. Despite this final quixotic adventure, Ha's story is permeated by a grief that won't be eased or transmuted by heroic images of resistance. Jian settles for shrewd, small rebellions, to prevent himself from becoming "just a piece of meat on a chopping board." Like Gao Xingjian, Ha continues to refine his understanding of politics as an unmitigated curse. (Oct. 22) Forecast: Arguably more accessible than Waiting, which won a National Book Award, The Crazed should bolster Ha Jin's reputation as the premier novelist of the Chinese diaspora. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
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 must find a way of distinguishing their writing from that of the memoirists who have saturated the market. US-based Ha Jin did this admirably in the award-winning Waiting , a doleful Chekhovian tale which balanced the horrors of Chinese officialdom against a bitter love story. His follow-up, The Crazed , attempts a similar sleight of hand. At first glance Ha Jin appears to have lost some of his lightness of touch. There is a depressing, communism-by-numbers feel about the way he drops background detail into the plot. Thus in the first 50 pages or so we learn of the confiscation of imported Bibles, the ban on electric stoves in student dormitories and the housing crisis facing young married couples. The web of conspiracy and corruption that features later also looks suspiciously like part of an identikit China. Ha Jin's talent is narrative, however, and when he has dispensed with scene-setting The Crazed becomes a compelling book. Its focus is the relationship between graduate student Jian Wan and his mentor, Professor Yang. Once a widely loved tutor, Yang has suffered a stroke and is now little more than a voice, by turns rabid and maudlin, a torrent of words pouring from his hospital bed. The challenge for the reader and for Jian, who has been assigned to look after Yang every afternoon, is to establish what is truth and what paranoia in the old man's ravings about women, poetry and departmental intrigue. This device allows Ha Jin to fill in the historical background (Yang was reviled as a "demon-monster" under the cultural revolution, and much of his discourse is on the tribulations of the past) while increasing the tension of this roman a clef. It is in the hospital scenes, as Jian and his fellow student Banping struggle to contain their embarrassment when their tutor breaks into the chorus of a Maoist ditty or instructs them to "Kill all those bastards!", that the novel is most coherent. Its theme - the truth- telling madman and the impact he has on his disciple - may be an old one, but it is dynamic. Outside the hospital Ha Jin is on less certain ground, and few of the other characters are as well-drawn as the central two. In an acknowledgement he records that an initial draft of the book was written in 1988, one year before the student uprising that provides the climax of The Crazed . The linking of this small-scale tragedy with the national disaster in Beijing makes literary sense, bringing as it does a whole new cast of characters who fit the title, from the student protesters to the army commanders who respond to them with tank fire. But Ha Jin was not a witness to the Tiananmen massacre (he left China in 1985 to study in America and, unsurprisingly, decided not to return after 1989). Vital as it is to keep the atrocity in the public mind, his account has little to add to what we already know. If this novel fails to live up to the promise of its predecessor, it is perhaps because it falls prey to the problem that faces much diaspora literature - the need to explain the motherland, rather than just to write. But this shouldn't overshadow what Ha Jin has achieved in his tragi-comic portrayal of Yang and the naive Jian. This novelist has a fine sense of the human scale of history and an eye for the absurd, and if he continues to write about China he'll need plenty of both. To order The Crazed for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-hajin.1 [Ha Jin]'s talent is narrative, however, and when he has dispensed with scene-setting The Crazed becomes a compelling book. Its focus is the relationship between graduate student Jian Wan and his mentor, Professor Yang. Once a widely loved tutor, Yang has suffered a stroke and is now little more than a voice, by turns rabid and maudlin, a torrent of words pouring from his hospital bed. The challenge for the reader and for Jian, who has been assigned to look after Yang every afternoon, is to establish what is truth and what paranoia in the old man's ravings about women, poetry and departmental intrigue. - Sarah A Smith.
Kirkus Review
A vigil at the bedside of a beloved teacher and mentor challenges, then changes the course of, a young graduate student's life: the deeply felt "new" novel by Chinese-born American author Ha Jin (Waiting , 1999, etc.). A concluding acknowledgement refers to a draft of this novel existing in 1988, and it certainly feels like a young man's work. It narrator and protagonist, 26-year-old Jian Wan ("a rising scholar in poetic studies") is preparing, in 1989, for his Ph.D. exams when his department "assigns" him to help care for eminent Professor Yang (also the father of Jian's fiancee, Meimei), who has suffered a debilitating stroke. Jian watches, horrified, as the dignified academic thrashes in delirium in his hospital bed ("Sometimes he blabbers like an imbecile and sometimes he speaks like a sage"), making "crazed" references to his past sufferings when denounced as a counterrevolutionary intellectual, a possible adulterous liaison with a younger woman, and his regrets for having chosen a scholar's life. Professor Yang's bitterness and despair gradually induce Jian to forsake his own studies, in favor of a "useful" life of activism (an ambition sharpened during a brief trip to the country, a development that seems to belong to another novel altogether). Jian's decision to forego his final exams enrages the industrious Meimei, and impels him to disprove her accusations of cowardice by joining a group of students planning to protest government injustices-in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where the story climaxes. Having become himself one of "the crazed," Jian now sees where his future lies, and the tale abruptly ends. At its best, this has some of the pacing and texture of a skillfully constructed mystery. And Ha Jin contrives several subtle foreshadowings indicating that Jian will not succeed in living a life "outside politics." But the payoff is a letdown: it feels more like a general statement about China's recent history than the result of its characters' fateful interactions. Not one of Ha Jin's better efforts. Still, readers who've admired his later fiction won't want to miss it.
Booklist Review
Jian Wan has plans. A graduate literature student, he's studying hard for Beijing University's Ph.D. entrance exams in the hope of living an academic life like that of his beloved mentor, Professor Yang. He also intends to marry Yang's ambitious daughter. But when Yang suffers a severe stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed and trapped in a form of dementia that induces him to relive his painful past out loud in distressing rants and raves, it falls to his high-strung and sensitive future son-in-law to act as caregiver. And so Jian sits and listens with growing despair as his possessed professor confronts his ghosts, recalls his horrendous internment at a hard labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, and rails against the tyrannical government. As in his National Book Award-winning novel, Waiting (1999), Ha Jin works on a spare narrative stage, in this case, a scruffy hospital room, on which a suspenseful and complex tale of dreams and betrayals unfolds. As Yang struggles with his demons, courageous student protesters mass on Tiananmen Square, and everything Jian has believed in and held dear begins to disintegrate. Gradually it becomes clear that Yang's anguish and Jian's predicament are microcosms of the overarching tragedy of their country. Writing with a searing restraint born of long-brewing grief over the Chinese government's surreal savageness, Ha Jin depicts a warped society in which everyone is driven mad by viciousness and injustice. But Ha Jin's dramatic indictment does not preclude love, or the ancient power of story to memorialize, awaken compassion, and shore up hope. Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Ha's first novel since the National Book Award-winning Waiting is set in 1989 China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. As Jian Wan sits by the bedside of his professor and future father-in-law, who has been felled by a stroke, he begins to discover peculiar yet arresting secrets about the professor's past. The seemingly delirious Yang is given to outbursts of shouting, singing, and talking to individuals who are not there. Scared but intrigued, Jian decides to delve deeper into the catalyst for Yang's mysterious behavior. Ha's multilayered, easy-to-read tale is intriguing as always, drawing the reader into the lives of his simple characters by creating complex story lines and striking a delicate balance between the humanistic and the political. Readers who appreciated Ha's previous works are sure to find this novel of interest. Recommended for large fiction and Asian literature collections in both public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/02.]-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
