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Summary: A Deceptively Simple STORY
Review: This book has a wonderful premise. Every summer for 18 years a man returns home to his village to divorce his wife, but something always goes wrong. The tone is somber, the story telling is restrained and clear. This book also won this year's National Book Award for fiction. I do have a couple of criticisms about the book. The first is that the story leaves you feeling unsure of who to sympathize with--the wife, the husband, or the girlfriend. The second criticism is that there is something of a "short story trick" at the end of the book. I can't explain what it is w/o giving the story away, but I felt slightly cheated by the story's ending. I think the trick would have granted a short story immense value, but I think it brought the novel down a notch. Regardless, I'm just picky. This book is worth the money and is a great read.
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Summary: Waiting for "Waiting".
Review: Ha Jin again proves that a book need not be filed with fifty cent words to be excellent reading.It's just everybodys speed!
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Summary: Extraordinary
Review: I didn't think I would want to read a book about Communist China, but this book intrigued me. The characters are symbolic of China's political state as it changes from Communism to its present state of an "open" COmmunist fashion. I didn't see it as a love story, but more of the endurance of man's spirit. To wait and wait for 20 years is an amazing feat. I love the irony of when Lin's waiting of 20 years ends and he is finally with Manna, they do not live happily ever after. Instead Lin struggles to maintain his sanity. This is alludes to CHina's current state in maintaining it's Communist values as it heads in to the next century.
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Summary: Interesting characters, descriptive style, short and simple
Review: For those of you who described that you were "waiting and waiting", and no bang bang, shoot em up every happened, this book wasn't for you! The title is simple, & the last chapter is where a man comes to grip with his own soul. The Doctor (Lin) immediately is discouraged with his arranged "homely, older, harsh looking wife" and while he lives in the city, and she in the country, it is easy for him to disassociate himself with spousal and parental duties. He meets a young nurse,(Manna) & Lin discovers it is not easy to obtain a divorce. So they are caught up in years of hoping, praying, and scheming for togetherness. Lin even persuades to give Manna to few prospects so she won't be the "old maid" she so desperately fears. Usually cheating lovers are so blinded with peripheral vision for one another and don't plan & agree their future once they are "free to marry". So it is the last chapter that the culmination evolves for Lin. True, I believe that the author could have elaborated on Manna's ever changing shifting personality. But it seems obvious that Lin will never be happy and would "stoop" to using his first wife again, simply because he "needed" her, even though he doesn't even really know her. So, he most likely would be "looking" again. Excellent Book!
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Summary: This is a great book!
Review: This is an excellent book that I highly recommend. Although it is slow in some parts, it is really worth the wait!
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Summary: Deceptively well written
Review: This book is not written with the outlandish style and genius of many contemporary writers. It's extraordinarily simple, both in its prose and in the story it tells. But something about it drew me in and kept me reading - maybe it was the sense that I was observing something about Chinese society that I'd never seen before, maybe it was the story itself. But I couldn't help but keep reading and was glad I did. This story captures the complexity of human relationships with a sort of Zen simplicity that takes deceptive skill - skill that is all too easy to miss perhaps. This is a very well written book. A very well thought out examination of human emotions. I recommend it highly.
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Summary: A Review of "Waiting"
Review: WAITING by Ha Gin Once in a great while, a work of art-a book, a play, a painting-reveals a truth so profound that you cannot believe that you were not previously aware of it. Waiting, the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction by the Chinese author Ha Gin, is such a book. "Your character is your fate" is such a truth. The book is brief; it can be read in one sitting. The writing is spare, unadorned, and as natural as breathing. The subject is love: love as loyalty, love as hope, love as comfort, love as passion, love as endurance. It is as much about the absence of love as it is about its presence. In a dual setting of rural and urban China following the Cultural Revolution, there is much to learn of the history, the culture and the boundaries of the individuals who live the story. The individuals, like people everywhere, are a living kaleidoscope of their background and their environment. Like spinning silk, Gin develops their character, which, in turn, propels their fate. From the metaphor of the single dark braid on the cover of the book, Gin laps and twists and binds his story. The opening sentence sets the repetitive structure in motion: "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." For eighteen years Lin Kong goes back and forth between his wife, Shuyu, and his unconsumated lover, Manna Wu; between the ancient culture of Goose Village and his life as a doctor in modern Muji City. His eventual marriage to Manna Wu is not a culmination; it is another loop in the braid. There is much more to come. Waiting is not exceptional because of its adept English prose written by a Chinese author; it is exceptional because of its clarity, its honesty, its compassion and its universal humanity-appropriate values to honor with the last National Book Award of the twentieth century.
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Summary: "Waiting": A Nihilist Version of Human Reality
Review: Does "Waiting" tell a tragic story? My answer is no: worse than that. Why, then, and how? These are questions hard to answer, although the story seems simple, and simpler is the writing style. "Waiting" must be read in a rather philosophic way. It is not a novel that enhances the process for waiting. Instead, the constant hopelessness and frustration of waiting in the story are its very effects that Ha Jin tries to configure and then to denounce. The plot is a deceptive cover in order to portray a sheerly deprived social reality where the most instinctive human desires and impulses are condemned. This explains why, after such a long period of waiting, the protagonist Lin Kong couldn't even enjoy the union, not even physically, with the woman who had waited 18 years for him. Although the author does not explicitly attribute Lin Kong's pathetic status to the social reality, it is clear that, as the only intellectual in the novel, Lin Kong embodies the outcome of Chinese Communism ideology. Worse than a tragedy which still expresses a strong value system, the nihilism is the ultimate spiritual reality of the protagonist. I find the ending of the novel masterful: it perpetuates such passive aspects of social reality by letting the former wife wait for the protagonist to return home, thereby starting another viscous circle. I admire the courage of Ha Jin in insisting on a realistic writing while the major trend of creative writing seems to pursue a fashionable, postmodern, and often incomprehensible style. Regrettably, I find the narrative development lacks imagination.
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Summary: Instead of reading "Waiting," I should have repeated:
Review: "The grass is always greener on the other side" or "Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it." While "Waiting" may be a triumph of well-written English prose by a person who is not a native speaker, its pace is coma-inducing slow for many of us. Years and years go by and nothing happens. This is not a book for those seeking a lively and interesting plot. It's better suited for the reader who likes to savor a line or a paragraph, dissecting it while relishing the word play.
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Summary: More than a love story
Review: What many of the reviewers of this book seem to be missing about this work by Ha Jin is its allegorical nature, that draws more than one reminder in this reader's mind to Orwell's "Animal Farm." Yes, it is written in a simple manner both in style and in plot. Some would call this the story's strength and others, it's weakness. One thing is clear, however. The narrative that Ha has crafted is not simply one about lovers who through the constraints of their cultural and political situation cannot consummate their relationship. It is not simply about not being satisfied with what we have and waiting for what we want while life passes us by. Put simply, to classify this a love story is to do this work a disservice. On a symbolic level, Ha is telling us the story of the China of the 20th century and the struggle of its people to come to terms with the convulsive transitions (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) that this nation has experienced over the past 100 years. To say that China is a land of complexities and contradictions is a vast understatement. One of the most basic dilemmas of the last century has been the struggle between old China, the land of emperors, Confucius, and bound feet, and new China, industrial and economic man-child, forcing its way into the modern world. This is the conflict around which this story unfolds. Every character is a symbolic representation of larger belief systems, ideas, and positions in modern Chinese society. In this context, it is not difficult to guess what Shuyu and Manna represent. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, because of the poignant statement it makes about the state of China, a land that, as a Chinese-American whose family has lived abroad for 50 years, I have a profound need to connect with. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
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