The Crazed

This is the latest novel from Chinese-born Ha Jin, whose 1999 bestseller Waiting won the US National Book Award for Fiction. As The Crazed opens, its main character, Chinese literature student Jien Wen is working hard to prepare for Beijing University's PhD entrance exams. But then his mentor and future father-in-law, Professor Yang, suffers a severe stroke and it falls to Jien to look after him. As Jien sits by Yang's bedside he becomes increasingly concerned that the stroke has left his mentor half-demented. Yang shouts and sings, raves and rants as he apparently relives many of the most private and painful events of his life. The mosaic of Yang's life that emerges and his heartbroken grief over the way his life turned out shock Jien to the core and make him re-evaluate his own beliefs and aims in life. In a story set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square uprising Jien's personal dilemma and Yang's private demons come to symbolize the upheavals that have shaken Communist China and often viciously crushed its people. Ha Jin is a natural storyteller who uses spare prose to create a multilayered world. He balances the political and the personal to show a troubled society that can drive people mad by its injustices and warp others so they become vicious and grasping. This is a book that is easy to read but not easy to forget. (Kirkus UK)