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The Crazed |
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基本信息·出版社：Vintage
·页码：320 页
·出版日期：2003年10月
·ISBN：0099444887
·条形码：9780099444886
·版本：New Ed
·装帧：平装
·外文书名：发疯
内容简介 在线阅读本书
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 作者简介 Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationally best-selling novel
Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award; the story collections
The Bridegroom, which won the Asian American Literary Award,
Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and
Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/ Hemingway Award; the novel
In the Pond; and three books of poetry. He lives in Massachusetts and is a professor of English at Boston University.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 媒体推荐 From Booklist 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 SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review praise for Ha Jin
?Jin has the kind of effortless command that most writers can only dream about.?
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New York Times Magazine?His writing is steeped in wit, rich metaphorical underpinnings and . . . endless and wonderful detail.?
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Atlanta Journal-Constitution?Ha Jin depicts the details of social etiquette, of food, of rural family relationships and the complex yet alarmingly primitive fabric of provincial life with that absorbed passion for minutiae characteristic of Dickens and Balzac.?
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Los Angeles Times Book Review?He could teach some native-born writers a few things about the beauty of spare prose and the power of a few well-chosen words.?
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USA Today?Ha Jin?s natural storytelling quietly captures the texture of daily life in a dual Chinese culture.?
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Village Voice Literary Supplement?For his revelations about ordinary life in the hinterlands of China . . . Ha Jin commands attention. For his mastery of the literary craft in English, he merits awe.?
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San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle?Ha Jin achieves a novella-like compression of narrative power and a Tolstoyan wide-angle empathy. . . . As a chronicler of the craziness of post?Cultural Revolution China, he?s an Ishmael, a singular eyewitness telling us of a dazzling tragedy.?
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 编辑推荐 Amazon.com Set during the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989,
The Crazed, a novel from Ha Jin, the award-winning author of the bestseller
Waiting, unites a prominent Chinese university professor who suffers a brain injury and Jien Wen, a favorite student and future son-in-law who becomes his caretaker. As Professor Yang rants about his earlier life, his bizarre outbursts begin to strike Jien as containing some truth and, considering the uncertain times, he puzzles over their meaning. When Jien realizes that his additional responsibilities make sitting for his Ph.D. exams impossible, Meimei, his fiancée, promptly discards him, branding him as unloving, since passing the exams would have ensured they would both have attended graduate school in Beijing. Unmoored from the university, and unconnected to anything else, Jien joins the student movement and as a result becomes a police suspect.
Problematic to the plot is that Meimei is hardly warm to Jien; their relationship never appears to be anything but doomed. The professor's hallucinatory diatribes comprise the bulk of the novel, and initially it seems unlikely that a story will ever evolve from these ramblings. But with Yang indisposed, minor characters from the university conspire to devise means to further their personal agendas. A mystery results, as university and literature department personnel plot to have someone other than Jien marry Meimei. Jin's prose is succinct, but the most interesting parts of Jien's life occur, unfortunately, at the end of the book, leaving readers who fell for Waiting wanting more. --Michael Ferch --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
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 fiancee 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.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
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.
Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
