| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters' hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna are especially ideological and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle (While the audience shouts, "Down with Japanese Imperialism!" the couple holds hands and gaze dreamily into each other's eyes). When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled "To Get Rich is Glorious" after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear:
Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.
Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the US only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Time
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Questions the very essence of who we are and what we become.,
By
This review is from: Waiting (Paperback)
In this highly structured novel of life within the Chinese People's Liberation Army and in the very rural countryside, Ha Jin offers the reader a way to understand the culture and character of people living under repressive conditions. To Lin Kong, his wife Shuyu, and his chaste lover Manna Wu, life is a process of acceptance, not choice, a life in which there are no personal goals, other than working for the greater good of the country and its leaders. Because the concept of freedom simply does not exist here, it never enters anyone's mind. No one feels its loss or yearns for it, and an individual seeks neither happiness nor pleasure, instead finding satisfaction within the system.Lin Kong, a physician working eleven months of the year in Muji City while his wife works the farm in Goose Village, experiences the sensations of love for the first time when he is attracted to Manna Wu, a nurse at his army station. Having previously accepted an arranged marriage, he is the legal husband of an older woman whose only attraction has been the care she lavished on his sick and elderly parents. For eighteen years he endures the limbo of trying to obtain a divorce from his wife while obeying the army's requirements that he and Manna Wu remain physically chaste. Ha Jin's prose is efficient and straightforward, much like the life of his characters, and one neither expects nor misses the flights of poesy so often found in novels of China written by westerners. The chief attraction of this novel is the care with which Ha Jin recreates the atmosphere of life in Communist China, showing us how ordinary people conduct their lives under conditions which we would find intolerable. His careful choice of details to illuminate the ironies of his characters' lives give power to a narrative about people who have no individual power. He succeeds admirably in bringing to life characters whose whole concept of what it means to be a person is diametrically opposed to our own, making humans out of people who live lives of structure, not of choice.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a beautiful love story,
By A Customer
This review is from: Waiting (Paperback)
I thought this was going to be too slow for me as a reader of mostly crime and thrillers,but what unfolded was one of the most beautiful love stories set in the amazing chinese culture that I became captivated and read and readit was slow moving ,sensitive and drew the reader into another world. Iwould thoroughly recommend reading this.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful book detailing a relationship changing over time,
By A Customer
This review is from: Waiting (Paperback)
Waiting is a captivating read. It details the changing phases of a forbidden and unconsumated love affair over almost 2 decades. Over time the centre of the relationship becomes the waiting rather than their love which leads to a hollow and empty union. The details of Chinese culture are fascinating and unforced.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
