The Crazed: A Novel - Hardcover

Jin, Ha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375421815 ISBN 13: 9780375421815

Publisher: Pantheon, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product Description:

Assigned to care for his fiancTe's father, Professor Yang, a respected literature teacher, after he suffers a stroke, Jian Wan is disturbed when the professor begins to rave against his family, colleagues, and the system, and risks everything in a China in the midst of the violent aftermath of Tiananmen to delve into the professor's past to uncover the truth. 100,000 first printing.

Review:

"Ha Jin takes the lead of ordinary life and turns it into gold. . . . Haunting . . . wrenching. . . . A work that deserves to be immortal." --The Washington Post

"Ha Jin's empathy for his characters is matched by his unwillingness to give them a break. Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world--and somehow it's a pleasure. . . . Like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences." --The New Yorker

"A work of enormous intelligence. Piercing, critical, but leavened by Jin's understated prose, The Crazed is a substantial addition to the corpus of a great author." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A work of literature, in the highest tradition of Anton Chekhov or Yasunari Kawabata, suffused with an aching purity." --Houston Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375421815
• ISBN 13: 9780375421815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336