A review by siria
The Crazed by Ha Jin

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.