Word: ha
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...Ha ha. Did any of your freshman roommates annoy...
Although there is nothing inherently funny about two people being romantically thwarted for nearly two decades, Waiting turns, page by careful page, into a deliciously comic novel. Ha Jin, who left his native China in 1985 to study at Brandeis University and then remained in the U.S., tells this tale in an impeccably deadpan manner. He casts a wise, rather than a cold, eye on his characters' struggles, both with an inflexible social system and their own weaknesses. With two earlier collections of stories and a novella, Ha Jin attracted notice as a guide to a world few outside China...
...Kong, the hero of Ha Jin's Waiting (Pantheon; 308 pages; $24), is hardly the first man, in or outside of fiction, to wish to end his first marriage and wed the woman he now loves. But rarely, if ever, has such a fellow been bedeviled by the array of obstacles Lin must confront. Not only is he scrupulously moral and thus vulnerable to all the guilty pangs of wayward husbandhood, but Lin's travails occur in a place--Communist China--and during a time--the early 1960s to the early '80s--when literally all occasions conspire against the quest...
...Beaver and Ganksheim to sit counting off seventy measures of silence. This doesn't seem to bother them, however. They feel that this downtime helps foster a healthy, laid-back community of percussionists. And of course, if they get hungry they can always cook up a delicious ragout. Ha...
What do I say? Ha...