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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
There's an early Ha Jin story about a soldier who falls in love with a wireless operator solely on the basis of her telegraphic style. He's afraid she'll never be interested in a man like him: "His wrists were thick, and his square thumbs always embarrassed him. But everybody was impressed by the beautiful long lashes above his froggy eyes." Ha Jin's empathy for his characters is matched by his unwillingness to give them a break. Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world--and somehow it's a pleasure.
Ha Jin's third novel, "The Crazed" (Pantheon; $24), like much of his earlier work, is a complicated web of human attachments; he traps his characters in impossible situations, and leaves them there to squirm. The narrator, Jian Wan, is a student of literature in a provincial university whose mentor, Professor Yang, suffers a stroke in the spring of 1989. Because Jian is engaged to the professor's daughter--a student in Beijing who writes to him about the gathering democracy protests there--he is asked to keep...
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