Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...novel The Crazed ends amid the aftermath of the bloody Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Jian Wan, the longhaired grad student and narrator, has been in Beijing and has seen the monstrous crackdown firsthand. Back in his staid university town, he is tipped off that the police are coming to arrest him as a counterrevolutionary. He flees, hawking his Phoenix bike to a fruit vendor for some apricots and enough change to buy a train ticket to Nanjing. From there, Jian plans to board an express train heading south to Guangzhou, then sneak into Hong Kong and eventually make...
...Though not a sequel to The Crazed, 51-year-old Ha Jin's latest novel A Free Life begins, chronologically, where that book left off - a sort of literary diptych. It's July 1989, a month after Tiananmen, with gloom and anxiety still charging the atmosphere. Chinese student and would-be poet Nan Wu and his wife Pingping are living near Boston while Nan finishes his Ph.D. at Brandeis, and they have no desire to return to a paranoid, post-Tiananmen China. Instead, they send for their only child, 6-year-old Taotao, who has been living with his grandparents...
...novel War Trash - an exhaustively researched work about the Korean War and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award - was his first to be set outside China. A Free Life is the first to be set in his adopted home, and he deftly conjures an American landscape of rolling, wide-open spaces spangled by brawny, glimmering rivers ("This sight beats the Yangtze," Pingping gushes, while she gazes at the "mighty and vast" Hudson, just outside New York City). There are also decent depictions of bland, sleepy McSuburbs like Lilburn, Ga. - a typical bedroom community of electricians, engineers, stucco churches and donut shops...
...five years before an uprising at New York City's Stonewall Inn sparked the gay-rights movement, Canadian writer Jane Rule published a novel with a radical premise. A female professor goes to Nevada to get a divorce, falls in love with a woman, and the two live happily ever after. Desert of the Heart, a landmark in gay fiction, inspired the 1985 film Desert Hearts, the first major feature to favorably depict a lesbian relationship. Rule...
...candles and a vast canvas featuring a moonlit lake, is a surreal spectacle in the midst of Mexico City's grinding traffic, colonial churches and endless protest marches. To add to the illusion of escape, sweet ballads play through huge speakers as the skaters glide along. Skating is a novel experience for most of those venturing onto the ice, and teams of white-helmeted city workers are constantly rushing to help citizens who have fallen on their faces. "Don't form chains," a supervisor cautions over the public-address system. "Don't smoke in the rink. Don't talk...