Word: jin
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...this flowering been perceived by those left behind in China? Perhaps it hasn't even been noticed. Four years after U.S.-based Ha Jin won a National Book Award and three years after France-based Gao Xingjian was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, the work of these two internationally hailed Chinese authors is still largely unseen inside China. Sadly, the China-born authors now emerging on the world's literary stage remain largely unknown inside their native country. Some are still banned...
...Jin 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...
...Crazed has elements that Waiting lacked: a recognizable plot with a recognizable, powerful climax. But whereas Waiting gained passion from the slow-burn love of its main characters, The Crazed is forced to rely on too-familiar history. This time around, Jin aims for more but achieves less...
...dark vision of China in The Crazed is that "of an old hag so decrepit and brainsick that she would devour her children to sustain herself." As Jin sees it, the Chinese are walled in on all sides: the intellectuals by a culture of falsehood, the students by tanks and troops, the peasants by their relentless poverty and everyone by paralyzing fear. In Waiting, Jin explored the emotional cost of enduring within those walls, but in The Crazed the pressure is simply too much. The dream of so many can be deferred no longer. Like a stroke, the only...