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valerie87's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars.
Very simply and beautifully written. Made me think a lot about the direction our lives take us and how presumptious we can be about other people's lives. I had this on my bookshelf for many years and I'm glad I finally read it. I will most certainly be reading Ha Jin's Waiting.
Very simply and beautifully written. Made me think a lot about the direction our lives take us and how presumptious we can be about other people's lives. I had this on my bookshelf for many years and I'm glad I finally read it. I will most certainly be reading Ha Jin's Waiting.
jesshaleth's review
3.0
I get the feeling that perhaps my tastes are terribly unrefined for this. Either that, or 80% is extremely slow paced, and feels somewhat irrelevant in the face of the last fifth of the book. I know that of course it wasn't, and we needed to properly appreciate the situation that Jian was in to really get the end. However, I didn't enjoy spending time with Jian. Of course - he's SUPPOSED to be a bit of a loser, but I really didn't find anything about him that interested me at all, making me not care much what happened. Indeed, even by the end it wasn't really him I cared about. That said, it compelled me to keep reading, and it painted an interesting portrait.
downby1's review against another edition
3.0
The Crazed was the first of Ha Jin’s books I read after stumbling across it as a new release when working at a public library. I did not remember much about the book other than a considerable feeling of disappointment and a few of the main characters. After re-reading War Trash (which has become my favorite of his novels), I decided to revisit The Crazed as well.
The Crazed shares many common themes with the better known Waiting. Both novels mix a detailed look at domestic China (complete with the mixed views on post-Mao communism) with a bitter love story--or a series of bitter love stories in the case of The Crazed. However, the rich vividness and vitality of Waiting is oddly missing in Ha Jin’s later novel. The Crazed is a more heavy-handed affair with readers being repeatedly reminded of the distressing excess of communism in even the most mundane ways from prohibiting students the use of electric stoves to the banal stupidities of local political corruption. Ha Jin never relies overtly on scenery and place, but this seemed to be a Conrad-esque character of a landscape. It cheapened an already less evolved narrative and a highly limited cast of character. Ultimately, there are pieces of The Crazed that are still stunning, but they are wed to an overall novel that is just not as powerful or subtle as Ha Jin’s other works.
There was an element that remained just as striking in my second reading as it was in my first, although I do not know if it is entirely intentional. Ha Jin demonstrates the overwhelming geographical scale of China quite effectively, a feature often lost in literature that turns frequently to the equally large scale of China’s population. He does this by keeping the student protests and the Tiananmen Square massacre at the fringes of the novel throughout the book. They are both forces at work in the society of The Crazed, but their presence can be described as minor echoes until Jian, the protagonist, makes an ill-fated decision to join some of his fellow students in a trip to Beijing to join the protestors. Even accounting for official efforts to suppress the scale of the protest movement, the world of The Crazed is equally removed from the popular stirrings by them simply being too distant for much practical impact other than driving action among already dissatisfied local radicals.
Overall, I am sort of amazed I picked Ha Jin back up with this book being my first exposure to him several years ago. He has far better books to his name, and I recommend either Waiting or War Trash to those wanting to make a first encounter.
The Crazed shares many common themes with the better known Waiting. Both novels mix a detailed look at domestic China (complete with the mixed views on post-Mao communism) with a bitter love story--or a series of bitter love stories in the case of The Crazed. However, the rich vividness and vitality of Waiting is oddly missing in Ha Jin’s later novel. The Crazed is a more heavy-handed affair with readers being repeatedly reminded of the distressing excess of communism in even the most mundane ways from prohibiting students the use of electric stoves to the banal stupidities of local political corruption. Ha Jin never relies overtly on scenery and place, but this seemed to be a Conrad-esque character of a landscape. It cheapened an already less evolved narrative and a highly limited cast of character. Ultimately, there are pieces of The Crazed that are still stunning, but they are wed to an overall novel that is just not as powerful or subtle as Ha Jin’s other works.
There was an element that remained just as striking in my second reading as it was in my first, although I do not know if it is entirely intentional. Ha Jin demonstrates the overwhelming geographical scale of China quite effectively, a feature often lost in literature that turns frequently to the equally large scale of China’s population. He does this by keeping the student protests and the Tiananmen Square massacre at the fringes of the novel throughout the book. They are both forces at work in the society of The Crazed, but their presence can be described as minor echoes until Jian, the protagonist, makes an ill-fated decision to join some of his fellow students in a trip to Beijing to join the protestors. Even accounting for official efforts to suppress the scale of the protest movement, the world of The Crazed is equally removed from the popular stirrings by them simply being too distant for much practical impact other than driving action among already dissatisfied local radicals.
Overall, I am sort of amazed I picked Ha Jin back up with this book being my first exposure to him several years ago. He has far better books to his name, and I recommend either Waiting or War Trash to those wanting to make a first encounter.
mcnamasa's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.0
siria's review against another edition
1.0
I finished page three hundred and twenty of this novel with no more comprehension of what Ha Jin intended it to say than I had when I began page one. I picked it up because I was interested in learning more about what China was like in the late 80s, when public unrest boiled over into the protests in Tiananmen Square, but I didn't feel as if The Crazed conveyed any sense of that. It's dealt with, but mostly in a rather opaque way: at once too vague and too lacking in subtlety. I'm not sure if it's because the author's first language isn't English, or if it's an attempt to capture the speech patterns of whichever Chinese dialect that characters were speaking, but I thought the dialogue was incredibly awkward, and the main character boring and unlikeable. I'm really not sure what he was trying for with the ending of the novel, but whatever it was, it didn't work—I was left blinking and flicking back and forth to see if there was a page I'd missed.
errr's review against another edition
4.0
It loses a star because of random corny language like,"...two pillows stuffed with fluffy cotton.."
bibliobethreads's review against another edition
3.0
Thought this was beautifully written however found the ending was much better and more exciting than the rest of the book!
robforteath's review against another edition
3.0
The first 80% of the book is a tedious slog. We're aware of what the author is telling us, but it comes so slowly, and with such little variation, that it is a chore to keep reading.
If you make it through that, you'll see that things come together well in the final section. It's a very good payoff for all that setup.
If you make it through that, you'll see that things come together well in the final section. It's a very good payoff for all that setup.
bick_mcswiney's review against another edition
3.0
an interesting story set in '89 around the tiananmen square massacre. besides having a certain murakami type bizarre feel, there's some interesting theses about the comparison of Chinese and Western poetry. All in all, an okay read.