The Crazed: A Novel

US: Pantheon, 2002. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Since the appearance of his first book of stories in English, Ha Jin has wo n the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and garnered comparis ons to Dickens, Balzac, and Isaac Babel. "Like Babel," wrote Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review, "Ha Jin observes everything . . . yet h e tells the reader only-and precisely-as much as is needed to make his dece ptively simple fiction resonate on many levels." In his luminous new novel, the author of Waiting deepens his portrait of co ntemporary Chinese society while exploring the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betraya l. Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature at a provincial univer sity, has had a stroke, and his student Jian Wan-who is also engaged to Yan g's daughter-has been assigned to care for him. What at first seems a simpl e 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 boar d." 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.