Set during the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, The Crazed, a novel from Ha Jin, the award-winning author of the bestseller Waiting, unites a prominent Chinese university professor who suffers a brain injury and Jien Wen, a favorite student and future son-in-law who becomes his caretaker. As Professor Yang rants about his earlier life, his bizarre outbursts begin to strike Jien as containing some truth and, considering the uncertain times, he puzzles over their meaning. When Jien realizes that his additional responsibilities make sitting for his Ph.D. exams impossible, Meimei, his fiancée, promptly discards him, branding him as unloving, since passing the exams would have ensured they would both have attended graduate school in Beijing. Unmoored from the university, and unconnected to anything else, Jien joins the student movement and as a result becomes a police suspect.

Problematic to the plot is that Meimei is hardly warm to Jien; their relationship never appears to be anything but doomed. The professor's hallucinatory diatribes comprise the bulk of the novel, and initially it seems unlikely that a story will ever evolve from these ramblings. But with Yang indisposed, minor characters from the university conspire to devise means to further their personal agendas. A mystery results, as university and literature department personnel plot to have someone other than Jien marry Meimei. Jin's prose is succinct, but the most interesting parts of Jien's life occur, unfortunately, at the end of the book, leaving readers who fell for Waiting wanting more. --Michael Ferch


From Publishers Weekly
On the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Jian Wan, the narrator of Ha Jin's powerful new novel, comes upon two weeping students. "I'm going to write a novel to fix all the fascists on the page," says one of them. The other responds, "yes... we must nail them to the pillory of history." Ha's novel is written in the conviction that writers don't nail anyone to anything: at best, they escape nailing themselves. Jian is a graduate student in literature at provincial Shanning University. In the spring of 1989, his adviser, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke, and Jian listens as the bedridden Yang raves about his past. Yang's bitterness about his life under the yoke of the Communist Party infects Jian, who decides to withdraw from school. His fiancee Professor Yang's daughter, Meimei breaks off their engagement in disgust, but Jian is heartened by a trip into the countryside, after which he decides that he will devote himself to helping the province's impoverished peasants. His plan is to become a provincial official, but the Machiavellian maneuverings of the Party secretary of the literature department a sort of petty Madame Mao cheat him of this dream, sending him off on a hapless trip to Beijing and Tiananmen Square. Despite this final quixotic adventure, Ha's story is permeated by a grief that won't be eased or transmuted by heroic images of resistance. Jian settles for shrewd, small rebellions, to prevent himself from becoming "just a piece of meat on a chopping board." Like Gao Xingjian, Ha continues to refine his understanding of politics as an unmitigated curse.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Ha's first novel since the National Book Award-winning Waiting is set in 1989 China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. As Jian Wan sits by the bedside of his professor and future father-in-law, who has been felled by a stroke, he begins to discover peculiar yet arresting secrets about the professor's past. The seemingly delirious Yang is given to outbursts of shouting, singing, and talking to individuals who are not there. Scared but intrigued, Jian decides to delve deeper into the catalyst for Yang's mysterious behavior. Ha's multilayered, easy-to-read tale is intriguing as always, drawing the reader into the lives of his simple characters by creating complex story lines and striking a delicate balance between the humanistic and the political. Readers who appreciated Ha's previous works are sure to find this novel of interest. Recommended for large fiction and Asian literature collections in both public and academic libraries.Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Jian Wan has plans. A graduate literature student, he's studying hard for Beijing University's Ph.D. entrance exams in the hope of living an academic life like that of his beloved mentor, Professor Yang. He also intends to marry Yang's ambitious daughter. But when Yang suffers a severe stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed and trapped in a form of dementia that induces him to relive his painful past out loud in distressing rants and raves, it falls to his high-strung and sensitive future son-in-law to act as caregiver. And so Jian sits and listens with growing despair as his possessed professor confronts his ghosts, recalls his horrendous internment at a hard labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, and rails against the tyrannical government. As in his National Book Award-winning novel, Waiting (1999), Ha Jin works on a spare narrative stage, in this case, a scruffy hospital room, on which a suspenseful and complex tale of dreams and betrayals unfolds. As Yang struggles with his demons, courageous student protesters mass on Tiananmen Square, and everything Jian has believed in and held dear begins to disintegrate. Gradually it becomes clear that Yang's anguish and Jian's predicament are microcosms of the overarching tragedy of their country. Writing with a searing restraint born of long-brewing grief over the Chinese government's surreal savageness, Ha Jin depicts a warped society in which everyone is driven mad by viciousness and injustice. But Ha Jin's dramatic indictment does not preclude love, or the ancient power of story to memorialize, awaken compassion, and shore up hope. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“Ha Jin takes the lead of ordinary life and turns it into gold. . . . Haunting . . . wrenching. . . . A work that deserves to be immortal.” —The Washington Post

“Ha Jin’s empathy for his characters is matched by his unwillingness to give them a break. Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world—and somehow it’s a pleasure. . . . Like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences.” —The New Yorker

“A work of enormous intelligence. Piercing, critical, but leavened by Jin’s understated prose, The Crazed is a substantial addition to the corpus of a great author.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A work of literature, in the highest tradition of Anton Chekhov or Yasunari Kawabata, suffused with an aching purity.” —Houston Chronicle



Review
?Ha Jin takes the lead of ordinary life and turns it into gold. . . . Haunting . . . wrenching. . . . A work that deserves to be immortal.? ?The Washington Post

?Ha Jin?s empathy for his characters is matched by his unwillingness to give them a break. Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world?and somehow it?s a pleasure. . . . Like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences.? ?The New Yorker

?A work of enormous intelligence. Piercing, critical, but leavened by Jin?s understated prose, The Crazed is a substantial addition to the corpus of a great author.? ?San Francisco Chronicle

?A work of literature, in the highest tradition of Anton Chekhov or Yasunari Kawabata, suffused with an aching purity.? ?Houston Chronicle

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In The Crazed, novelist and poet Ha Jin brings forth another tale of life in the moral and political labyrinth of China. Set in 1989, it tells the story of a young graduate student, Jian Wan, who is assigned the task of caring for his stroke-addled poetry instructor. Listening to his former mentor babble about everything from an extramarital affair to his regrets about pursuing an academic life, he's moved to set aside his own scholarly aspirations and seek an "active" existence. The plan destroys both his relationship with his fiancée and his future in his own country. Wan, in an attempt to prove his worthiness, tries to join the protesters at Tiananmen Square. He almost loses his life in the process and is forced to flee China.

Though Ha Jin witnessed those historic events from afar (he was a doing graduate work in English at Brandeis University when the Tiananmen massacre took place), he uses them to great effect in this book, the first draft of which was prepared in 1988. His previous works include the poetry collections Between Silences and Facing Shadows and the novels Ocean of Words, Under the Red Flag, and Waiting, for which he received the National Book Award for fiction. Sam Stall

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Since the appearance of his first book of stories in English, Ha Jin has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and garnered comparisons to Dickens, Balzac, and Isaac Babel. “Like Babel,” wrote Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review, “Ha Jin observes everything . . . yet he tells the reader only—and precisely—as much as is needed to make his deceptively simple fiction resonate on many levels.”

In his luminous new novel, the author of Waiting deepens his portrait of contemporary Chinese society while exploring the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal. Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature at a provincial university, has had a stroke, and his student Jian Wan—who is also engaged to Yang's daughter—has been assigned to care for him. What at first seems a simple if burdensome duty becomes treacherous when the professor begins to rave: pleading with invisible tormentors, denouncing his family, his colleagues, and a system in which a scholar is “just a piece of meat on a cutting board.”

Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? And can the dutiful Jian avoid being irretrievably compromised? For in a China convulsed by the Tiananmen uprising, those who hear the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it. At once nuanced and fierce, earthy and humane, The Crazed is further evidence of Ha Jin's prodigious narrative gifts.

Author Biography: Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationallybest-selling novel Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award; the story collections The Bridegroom, which won the Asian American Literary Award, Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/ Hemingway Award; the novel In the Pond; and three books of poetry. He lives in Massachusetts and is a professor of English at Boston University.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Set in communist China, this novel from the author of the National Book Award￯﾿ﾽwinning Waiting is appealing but flawed. Jian Wan, a Chinese graduate student, has his future clearly charted: study for his doctorate in classical literature in Beijing; marry his fianc￯﾿ﾽe, Meimei; and spend his life as a distinguished scholar. However, two events reveal the hidden turmoil beneath the surface and radically alter his plans. First, his mentor and future father-in-law, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke. While nursing Yang, who has fallen into a "crazed" state of ranting, Wan discovers that his mentor's life is not as it appears. The second event is the 1989 student demonstration for democratic reform that takes place on Tiananmen Square. Revolution is in the air, and the once-innocent Wan begins to question his career path and marriage plans. While readers come to see the interplay between private dissatisfaction and public protest, this political allegory feels contrived at times. When Wan too closely heeds the mad and furious words of his hospitalized mentor, his life unravels in a manner that seems more convenient than credible. Author￯﾿ﾽJames Schiff

Book Magazine - James Schiff

Set in communist China, this novel from the author of the National Book Award￯﾿ﾽwinning Waiting is appealing but flawed. Jian Wan, a Chinese graduate student, has his future clearly charted: study for his doctorate in classical literature in Beijing; marry his fiancée, Meimei; and spend his life as a distinguished scholar. However, two events reveal the hidden turmoil beneath the surface and radically alter his plans. First, his mentor and future father-in-law, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke. While nursing Yang, who has fallen into a "crazed" state of ranting, Wan discovers that his mentor's life is not as it appears. The second event is the 1989 student demonstration for democratic reform that takes place on Tiananmen Square. Revolution is in the air, and the once-innocent Wan begins to question his career path and marriage plans. While readers come to see the interplay between private dissatisfaction and public protest, this political allegory feels contrived at times. When Wan too closely heeds the mad and furious words of his hospitalized mentor, his life unravels in a manner that seems more convenient than credible.

Publishers Weekly

On the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Jian Wan, the narrator of Ha Jin's powerful new novel, comes upon two weeping students. "I'm going to write a novel to fix all the fascists on the page," says one of them. The other responds, "yes... we must nail them to the pillory of history." Ha's novel is written in the conviction that writers don't nail anyone to anything: at best, they escape nailing themselves. Jian is a graduate student in literature at provincial Shanning University. In the spring of 1989, his adviser, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke, and Jian listens as the bedridden Yang raves about his past. Yang's bitterness about his life under the yoke of the Communist Party infects Jian, who decides to withdraw from school. His fianc e Professor Yang's daughter, Meimei breaks off their engagement in disgust, but Jian is heartened by a trip into the countryside, after which he decides that he will devote himself to helping the province's impoverished peasants. His plan is to become a provincial official, but the Machiavellian maneuverings of the Party secretary of the literature department a sort of petty Madame Mao cheat him of this dream, sending him off on a hapless trip to Beijing and Tiananmen Square. Despite this final quixotic adventure, Ha's story is permeated by a grief that won't be eased or transmuted by heroic images of resistance. Jian settles for shrewd, small rebellions, to prevent himself from becoming "just a piece of meat on a chopping board." Like Gao Xingjian, Ha continues to refine his understanding of politics as an unmitigated curse. (Oct. 22) Forecast: Arguably more accessible than Waiting, which won a National Book Award, The Crazed should bolster Ha Jin's reputation as the premier novelist of the Chinese diaspora. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT - Nola Theiss

It is 1989 and Jian Wan is a graduate student at a provincial Chinese university with his life well planned. He is going to marry the daughter of his mentor and favorite professor, do graduate work in Beijing and live happily ever after. When his professor has a stroke with his family far away and unable to care for him, Jian is assigned the duty of tending him in the hospital every afternoon. Jian soon comes to know more than he wants to know about his professor's personal life. The invalid's ravings make Jian re-evaluate his own plans. When he goes to Beijing with some of his fellow students, he becomes involved in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations without ever really evaluating his own political feelings. He then realizes that "It's personal interests that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history." The author uses a personal story to make that very point in this interesting novel for Westerners who know only what they have seen on TV about the events and culture that led to the students' revolt in China. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, Vintage, 323p., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal