Another brilliant installment in Ha Jin’s history of modern China (The Crazed, 2002, etc.), written with his usual...
The Chinese-born American author offers the fictional memoirs (historically based) of a Chinese officer’s difficult years as a POW in the Korean War—and the more difficult return to China after the ceasefire.
Yu Yuan is no one’s idea of a revolutionary, but as an army cadet at the Nationalist military academy in 1949, he greets Mao’s victory over the Nationalist forces with genuine relief, disgusted as he was with the corruption and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. He continues his military career under the Party and is eventually assigned to a “volunteer” unit of Chinese forces supporting the North Koreans against UN forces in the Korean War. Here, after his unit is ambushed, Yuan falls into American hands and is sent to a POW camp on an island off the Korean coast. He is pleasantly surprised to find little of the abuse that Party propaganda had assured the Chinese they would meet at the hands of American captors, but he is subjected to political pressures all the same. The Americans offer the Chinese prisoners a choice of repatriation to either Taiwan or the mainland, thus dividing the camp into Communist and Nationalist factions that fight among themselves. Although not a Communist, Yuan feels bound to return to China for the sake of his mother and fiancée, and this brings down upon him the wrath of the Nationalist prisoners, who go so far as to hold him down and tattoo anti-Communist propaganda on his chest. Even without the tattoo Yuan is a marked man back home, especially when the Cultural Revolution unleashes a pogrom against anyone deemed to have been tainted with Western ideas. But Yuan is canny enough to get by, and, having survived revolution, war, and prison, he manages to outlive the fanatics in the end.
Another brilliant installment in Ha Jin’s history of modern China (The Crazed, 2002, etc.), written with his usual understatement and clarity.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42276-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
