Rating: 
Summary: SO dull
Review: Possibly the most boring book I've ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Carpe Diem . . . Not
Review: In this age of instant gratification it seems almost unimaginable that two lovers could live side by side for the better part of their adult lives yet never dare sleep together. That is just what the two lead characters do in Ha Jin's prize-winning novel, Waiting. Lin Kong and Manna Wu meet and fall in love while working at a hospital in China during the Cultural Revolution. However, they dare not move beyond the platonic because Lin is married, though living apart from his wife, and they would risk severe penalties under the strict Chinese system if they became intimate and were found out. Divorce is an option but year after year when Lin returns to his village to cajole his reluctant wife into agreeing to a divorce circumstances conspire against him. It's a great story line and Ha Jin guides us through it with brisk, dialogue-suffused prose. In the process, he enlightens us about Chinese culture and provides ample evidence of the limits of freedom during the days of Chairman Mao. Most reviewers classify Waiting as a love story. And, indeed, the incredible restraint that both characters model through much of the book is both romantic and sexy. It reminded me in that sense of a Victorian love novel. But Ha Jin also infuses the story, especially in its later parts, with a heavy dose of reality that makes one rethink the quality of the love that Lin and Manna share and question their choices. The most intriguing character might be Lin's spurned wife, Shuyu, whose simple, unquestioned devotion to Lin gives her moral superiority and a kind of serenity that none of the other characters ever achieve. But she is a secondary character whose thoughts and motivations Ha Jin leaves unexplored. In the end, this is a good story, well told, that can be read on many different levels. It's also short enough - 300 breezy pages - that one can read it again, as I may, to pick up on some of the subtleties missed on the first go-through.
Rating: 
Summary: A novel about difficult choices one makes in life.
Review: Ha Jin's novel, "Waiting," is about Lin Kong, a gentle and scholarly man who is stuck in a loveless marriage with the stolid and dependable Shuyu, who was given to him in an arranged marriage. He leaves Shuyu in the countryside with their daughter, Hua, and he becomes an army doctor. The novel spans several decades, as Lin forms an attachment to a nurse named Manna, and decides to divorce his wife. The novel has little plot. Ha Jin concentrates on how Mao's Cultural Revolution changed the life of the Chinese, and how the social atmosphere in China from the sixties to the eighties limited the choices that men and women could make in work and in love. Ha Jin explores the attempts of the characters to express themselves as individuals and, at the same time, do what is proper in the eyes of the state and of their fellow citizens. How can they accumulate wealth without being denounced as bourgeois? How can they find love when the State stands in their way? Both Lin and Manna make difficult choices and they pay a price for their "happiness". Only Shuyu, who asks for nothing and gives of herself unstintingly, seems to emerge emotionally unscathed. Ha Jin has written a touching and low-key novel that beautifully describes life in China from the Cultural Revolution through its aftermath. He captures the feeling of rural China particularly well, describing the hardscrabble life that people live on a day to day basis. The characters and dialogue are simple yet affecting. Ha Jin seems to be saying that happiness, especially in a culture as constricting as that of China, is an elusive commodity. People who are brought up to repress their feeling and emotions often forget how to feel and often do not even know what they want. "Waiting" is a glimpse into a culture with which most Americans are completely unfamiliar.
Rating:
Summary: Boring and stilted writing
Review: I don't understand why this book won any awards. I found the main character to be an irritatingly passive male about whom I cared little. The only reason I kept reading was to see if anything turned up that made it worthwhile. I would have to say, no. Furthermore, the writing seems stilted and elementary -- like a very poor translation.
Rating:
Summary: Family values - Chinese style
Review: This is a nigh perfect novel. I loved the sparse simplicity of the writing even though I was initially bored by the soap opera plot of a man in love with a woman, not his wife. But then as it developed I thought, no, this story is more like a post-Cultural Revolution Good Earth. Afterall, there is the loyal, long suffering wife -- Shuyu, only in the modern version the husband abhors the fact that she has bound feet. (In The Good Earth, the wife is equally unsuitable to the upwarding mobile farmer because she has big feet.) In The Good Earth, the good wife steals precious gems and pearls to save the family from starvation. Here, Shuyu's herbal remedies save the lives of Lin's twin sons who are wasting away from dysentary. The concumbine in The Good Earth is little more than a Pekinese pet masquerading as a human being. In Waiting the second wife also becomes a bit of a haridan at the end. At the end of the day, Lin Kong realizes at last the gratitude and love due his loyal ex-wife and daughter. He begs them to take him back as soon as the second wife dies -- which is imminent due to a bad heart. Looking back, Lin is puzzled by the disaster that has become his second marriage and the ultimate failure of his life. He thinks of himself as a good and civilized man. What went wrong? Was it waiting too long? Did he miss the tide in the affairs of men? Or was it an absence of passion on his part? Did he lack the ability to love, was he only able to be the object of a woman's love? Lin played by the rules of the Communist society and led an unsatisfactory life. The brute who raped Manna thrives despite the curse she places on him. His brand of sociopathology serves him well in the modern capitalist China. Well, life isn't fair, even in post revoluntionary China. All of this makes for a most interesting and discussable book.
Rating: 
Summary: Emotionally Unsatisfying
Review: An expert in wine may appreciate the smallest nuiance in it's character, but the search for that nuiance takes precedent over the enjoyment of the bottle. If you want a story that will require you to revell in the smallest of subtleties at the expense of enjoyment of the book, then Waiting is for you. If you a looking for a tale of love, faith or hope, there are much better pages to turn. The prolouge reveals to us that the Lin's sought after divorce will not materialize for 18 years, so we read the next 200 pages knowing that Lin and Manna Wu will not be united, if at all, until much later. While the details of the 18 years are, at first, interesting, they begin to blur together into a series of inconsequential events. Like Lin and Manna Wu, who become comfortable in their relationship rut and plod along, the reader churns through the pages and plods through the story. While it is true that the years build and develop the characters, they do so at a snails pace. How many times do we have to be shown that Lin is indecisive and timid ? How often will Lin and Manna Wu suffer because they cannot break out of societal norms ? The plot develops more in the final chapters, but the outcome is telegraphed. Lin's eventual revelation that they waited just for the sake of waiting is both predictable and, worse, emotionally unsatifying for the reader. A true critic might call this a love story of infinte subtlety. I would not call it a love story at all. Ha Jin has instead written a political allegory of 60's and 70's China. Lin's wife and his love respectively symbolize the old and the new China as they fight for the soul of Lin. Lin is the people of China whose infinite patience ( or is Ha Jin saying infinite timidity? ) makes them unable to act and unable to change things for the better. For a book praised for its' subtlety, the symbolism is obvious.
Rating:
Summary: Love in Arduous, Interesting Times
Review: The familiar, ironic Chinese "wish," or curse, is that you "live in interesting times." In this serene, miraculously modulated narrative, Ha Jin's protagonist and other main characters pass through interesting times indeed--the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the period of "opening" to the US and, later, the broader world, and, finally, the post Mao period of Deng Xiaoping's reforms--with their humanity intact. Needless to say, Jin's lives are warped by external political and sociocultural forces, but, to a much greater extent than such works as Chen Jo-hsi's wonderful The Execution of Mayor Yin and whole shelves of memoirs from the Cultural Revolution decade, Waiting underscores the possibility of human relationships during a "scoundrel time." Although the book's final third moves toward outcomes that are somewhat trite and predictable, Ha Jin is a carefully observant guide who details the mores and folkways of his native society in anthropological detail, using these details in dabs to create a delicately wrought pointillistic tableau. Waiting satisfies at several levels and deserves a broad readership, and not only among admirers of literary fiction but, particularly, in undergraduate sociology and political science courses that now depict the Cultural Revolution, and Chinese society of the Mao period in general, either through horror stories or hagiograhical tales of failed idealism. Ha Jin's book has an honest texture of true lives lived.
Rating:
Summary: Waiting
Review: Perhaps I missed something, but this was a truly boring book. I found myself waiting for something to happen which never did. Man marries. Man moves. Man finds new love. Man tries to get rid of Wife year after year after year after year only to succeed and then to find there is no place like home. Well written? Yes, but so what?
Rating: 
Summary: A Reader's Wait
Review: Waiting is an extraordinarily annoying, yet suspensful read. The author makes the reader wait to find out if the new relationship will outshine the hollow relationship that Lin Kong had with his wife Shuyu. The ending makes the drawn out sequence of events -- in which Lin Kong travels back to his home town each year to divorce his wife and fails -- worth the wait. The book is not just about love and arranged marriage, like the cyclical events appear to imply. The book is about a man's struggle to realize who he is, what he desires, and how long he has waited to find it. Though Lin Kong's girlfriend, Manna Wu, waits for decades before she can marry Lin Kong, her wait is inconsequential. Shuyu waits for her husband to return to her and Lin kong is waiting for realization, contentment, and home. The book's ending is one surprise you won't mind waiting for.
Rating:
Summary: Talk about learning a stereotype or two
Review: This book is definitely one of those novels where you learn quite a bit about how Chinese men view women. Although it's a love story, I think many American women would never call what this man feels LOVE. He is so much more concerned with physical beauty and what others think that he doesn't always convince you that it's true love. But regardless of his shortcomings, I think that this book gives real insight into the Chinese culture during this time and I love learning about that in particular. Another favorite of mine is Memoirs of a Geisha.
|
