Word: jianli
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...Authors who stick with the Chinese language, such as Hong Ying and Ma Jian, are able to get Western exposure thanks to diligent translators. Ma's girlfriend, Flora Drew, and Hong's husband, Henry Zhao, are their avid advocates and translators. Ma stubbornly defends his unwillingness to read or write in English: "I believe one might benefit from reading great works in English. But I haven't tried to learn English at all. I'm a genius. I write because of my talents and inspiration. I don't need another language...
...Crazed is narrated by Jian Wan, a literature grad student whose transformation is at the center of the novel. Rational to the point of detachment, yet endowed with the seeds of a turbulent inner life, he's an ideal if slightly tiresome mouthpiece for Jin's realist voice. When his mentor, Professor Yang, suffers an "unsettling" stroke, Jian dutifully cares for him but worries that the job will interfere with his upcoming exams. Unlike his passionate professor, who suffered in the Cultural Revolution for declaring that Goethe was a great poet, Jian barely cares for literature, studying only...
...Yang's madness, Jian begins to find clarity of mind. Yang's caustic torments terrorize his mild student?and gradually cause Jian to question the career that has been set before him, the mentor he thought he knew and the world in which he lives. He's not the only one. While Jian sinks into depression, wondering whether he should bother sitting for his exams and doom himself to a barren life "as a clerk in a workshop", news of a student gathering in Beijing arrives through BBC radio broadcasts and Meimei's letters from the restive capital. Jian wants...
...nails the claustrophobic, poisonous atmosphere of academia, but the recounting of life in the bamboo tower quickly grows didactic and stale. The reader tires of it faster than Jian does. It doesn't help that Jian is an affecting character but too often a lifeless narrator; like a typical grad student, he often misses the greater point for the stubborn detail. He watches his future father-in-law ignited by a Lear-like madness and wonders obtusely, "Perhaps he should be treated by a psychiatrist; acupuncture or acupressure might help...
...novel and Jian roll closer to June 4, it becomes clear, almost too clear, that the pent-up anguish of Yang, his student and all of seething China will break open in Beijing, "the sick heart of this country." Jin's description of the massacre is vivid, short and sorrowful, suffused with the Inferno-like imagery he evokes throughout the novel. Frenzy overtakes first the soldiers, "unstoppable like a crazed dragon," and then their victims, consumed by grief, cursing the government even as they fall. It's at Tiananmen that Jin's scrupulous realism, which can prove a drag, pays...