Word: nan
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...Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu...
...telling of Nan's story, however, that the book really falls flat. Rather predictably, the swift transition from starving student-poet to middle-class business owner leaves him spiritually barren. He spends grueling days behind a fiery wok pondering how to balance his duty as a breadwinner with his duty as a poet. His writer friends are getting noticed, and he's not. (If you read his verses, appended at the end of the book, you'll see why. "Don't blame me if I am such a man/ who goes to ball games as a major fan," Nan chimes...
...writers love to draw on their own professional struggles as they disgorge novels about being or trying to become writers. But in an age when so many cultural products compete for the public attention, to bring forth yet another work of this kind - to spend a book pondering, as Nan does, the question, "Do you have to live a literary life to produce literary work?" - is risky indeed. Ha Jin's demotic prose is as smooth as Windexed glass, but A Free Life lacks the dark, propulsive verve of his earlier work. And in the end, Nan Wu is little...