2011: The Books

When people ask me about my favorite book, I often have no idea what to say.  Come up with one book that I like more than any other book that I’ve ever read?  How am I supposed to do that?  I most certainly have books I like more than others.  There are books I love and books I hate.  But I find it almost impossible to choose one single work that I value above all others because, among the really great books, they each have something of value that can’t be fairly compared to others.

In this spirit, my new years review of the books I read in 2011 will not be a single ordered list of books I liked culminating in my favorite book of the year.  Instead, I’ve come up with a few categories into which I can place just some of the books I read last year.  This list is by no means comprehensive but it gives some good examples of what made me happy to be a reader in 2011.

The “Try Not to Make an Ass of Yourself By Laughing Hysterically in Public Places” Books

The Books:  Pygmy by Chuck Palahnuik; Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Friend by Christopher Moore; God, No! by Penn Jillette; Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre

Most books are not laugh-out-loud funny.  They might inspire a smirk, or an inside chuckle, maybe a giggle.  But, some books are pee-your-pants funny.  Christopher Moore’s Lamb is one of these books.  The story of Jesus’ missing years is narrated by Biff, a well-meaning but flawed sidekick to the Son of God.  For all it’s wacky irreverence, the book manages to remain surprisingly inoffensive, no small feat when dealing with two teenage boys (even if one of them is Christ).  Penn Jillette’s God No! could be summed up with  “a fat dude vomits all over naked strippers in zero gravity.”  That sentence in itself is funny and the book follows suit.  Jillette does, however, get a little bit preachy in his hatred of anything religious and that drags the book down.  Pandaemonium, by Christopher Brookmyre, sits in as a a gaggle of hormonal teens battle demons at a forest getaway.  Sex, drugs, and mayhem predictably lead to hilarious results.  And Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk, tells the story of an adolescent spy sent to the American heartland to instigate chaos and destruction.  Told through the butchered syntax and grammar of a non-native speaker, Pygmy  is a brutal satire of American society in the guise of a raucous farce.  It was certainly the funniest book I read in 2011.

The “It Would Be So Cool to Do These Things But I Don’t Actually Want to Die” Books

The Books:   Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer; No Way Down by Graham Bowley; The Wave by Susan Casey; Blind Descent by James Tabor

Four very strong books round out this category of tales chronicling men and women jabbing their fingers into nature’s eye by exploring those places where mortals have no business being.  Two have to do with mountain climbing tragedies in the Himalayas.  Krakauer’s Into Thin Air  and Bowley’s No Way Down  read as gripping thrillers set on the rooftop of the world.  Turning a complete 180, Blind Descent by James Tabor follows those who explore the earth’s deepest depths in a claustrophobic tale of supercave spelunking.  The final work in this category is Susan Casey’s The Wave.  She follows  scientists, sailors, and (of course) surfers on a quest to find the worlds largest and most dangerous waves.  The tale of a 1700+ foot wave alone makes this book a gripping read.

The “Sometimes Religion Makes People do Crazy Things” Books

The Books:  Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer; Underground by Haruki Murakami; Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman; The Cleanest Race by B.J. Myers

There were four excellent books in this category, each one exploring a different religious movement and their often tragic collisions with mainstream society.  Haruki Murakami’s Underground deals with the 1995 gassing of the Tokyo subway system by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult.  Murakami chooses to forgo any sort of author driven narrative by telling the story almost entirely in the words of the victims and cult members.  The result is a sobering meditation on Japanese society and it’s culpability in this horrific tragedy.  Inside Scientology,  by Janet Reitman, takes a more traditional approach in exploring the origins, beliefs, and future of Scientology.  Her research is insightful and scathing.  While remaining sympathetic to Scientology’s many adherents, she paints a vivid portrait of a power-hungry organization founded by a delusional huckster and being led into the 21st century by a violent sociopath.B.J. Myers’ The Cleanest Race seems to be misplaced in this category as it is a book about how the North Korean people perceive themselves and how this affects contemporary geopolitics.  Myers, however, makes a very persuasive argument that the North Korean worldview is informed by their own psuedo-religious belief in the purity of their race and in their leaders ability to protect this innocence against an onslaught of corruption and filth from the rest of the world.  Finally, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven explores the violent roots of Mormonism while telling the story of a grisly modern-day murder.  This story of faith gone awry is masterfully told, moving at times more like a thriller than a religious history.  His book challenges believers to ask themselves how far they might go in the name of faith and, depending on the answer, what this implies about the very nature of religious belief.

The “WTF???” Books

The Books: American Psycho by Brad Easton Ellis; Ed King by David Guterson; The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks; Pygmy by Chuck Palahnuik

As an adult reader of literary fiction, one can very easily become desensitized to scenes of violence and sexuality (or a combination of the two).  Depictions of this nature often pop up in various works and, having read hundreds of them, they’re usually not quite as shocking as perhaps they should be.  Still, every so often a book can truly jolt.  Dave Guterson’s Ed King is a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex and is billed as such.  Therefore, the ending’s not a complete surprise.  No matter how prepared you are, however, it’s still cringe-inducing when the titular character discovers the truth about his wife.  Chuch Palahnuik’s Pygmy makes a second appearance for its bipolar swings between boring suburban life and graphic mayhem.  The scene where the diminutive narrator deals with an oafish bully will test your resolve as you try not to laugh at something that shouldn’t be in any way funny.   The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks also deals with an adolescent narrator prone towards violence and sociopathic behavior.  As his story careens towards it’s disturbing surprise ending, he spends his time collecting his own bodily fluids, killing dogs, and torturing wasps.  The last book in this category, however, makes the rest of these seem like appropriate bedtime stories for toddlers.  Brad Easton Ellis’ American Psycho depicts scenes of violence, sex, and sexual violence more disturbing and graphic than anything else legally available.  Readers beware.

“Even Though I’m a Guy, I Sometimes Cry a Little at the End of Books”

The Books:  Room by Emma Donoghue; 11/22/63 by Stephen King; Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

I’m not a crier.  Even if I was, I probably wouldn’t admit it.  But, I’d be lying if I said that these books didn’t bring a tear to my eye.  Stephen King’s 11/22/63 may seem like an unlikely choice – time travelling alternate histories aren’t exactly known for their emotional potency.  King, however, turn this tale into a poignant meditation on memory, loss, and time.  You’d have to be one tough person to remain dry-eyed at the end of this one.  Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men needs little explanation.  The ill-fated story of George and Lenny has been regurgitated so many times in pop-culture that it almost seems cliche.  But this doesn’t negate the raw emotional power of this tragic novella.  The gem in this category, however, was Emma Donoghue’s Room.  The brilliance of this novel lies in the author’s use of Jack, a six year old narrator.  Jack’s innocence in the face of a dark,cruel world is both heartbreaking and exhilarating.

 

 

Nightmare on Yellow Mud Street

Think for a moment of the most wretched, filthy, and decrepit slum you’ve ever seen.  Hopefully, what you’re thinking of is someplace that you’ve never had the misfortune to experience personally, but perhaps someplace you’ve seen in a  news broadcast from some forgotten corner of the world.  Picture the slumping, rotting buildings.  The piles of festering garbage.  Rivers of human excrement flowing away from open latrines.  Dead dogs, pigs, and the occasional human body swarming with flies on the side of the road.

Now, imagine this place as it might appear in Salvador Dali’s darkest nightmare.

Mushrooms sprout instantaneously from beneath moldy quilts.  Human ears rot and fall off overnight.  Torrential rains of dead fish and rats fall from the sky.  Moths as big as bats hide under the eaves of the latrine until they take flight with a mournful whistle.  A man, upon feeling a strange itch on his back, removes his jacket to find that the lining has been completely replaced with a writhing mass of worms.

Welcome to Yellow Mud Street.

In Can Xue’s novella, the people of Yellow Mud Street not only live in an unrelenting nightmare of filth and decrepitude, but also in a constant state of paranoia and uncertainty.  A man disappears and no one is quite sure whether he ever actually existed.  Government officials come from the city to investigate, although the subject of their investigation is ambiguous.  Schemes and plots are hatched, although its unclear who is scheming and who is being schemed against. One character is absolutely certain that, whatever the problem may be, there is a “yellow weasel” responsible.

In describing a piece of writing such as this, terms such as “like” and “dislike” tend to lose any real meaning.  There were long passages of the story that literally disgusted me.

When the sun is up, everything goes rotten, everywhere.  The vegetable mound in front of the market steamed in the sun.  Its yellow drainage ran to the corner of the street.  Every household hung last year’s rotten fish and meat in the sun.  White maggots crawled all over. Tap water had become undrinkable also.  It was said that a decomposing corpse had blocked the pump. For days, people had been drinking corpse water….Stinking water oozed from the aged putrid ulcers on their shanks.

This is one of the tamer passages, one that doesn’t deal explicitly with human excrement or other fluids that seep from dead things.

Yet, in between, there are jarring moments of near hilarity.  When a mob shows up at Director Wang’s home demanding to know what he thinks of the rumors that the street may be relocated, they converse back and forth for a few minutes before the following happens.

Director Wang furrowed his brow.  Suddenly, he lit up.  “The fundamental reason is, comrades, I remember something!”  The thing he remembered was that he had only his underwear on.

Absurd, but extremely funny.

Like a dream, the story jumps from one image to another, juxtaposing the horrific with the absurd, the comical with the tragic, and the abstract with the concrete.  It’s a jarring experience, but one that works within the twisted confines of the narrative.  And, like a dream, the reader is often left wondering what just happened upon putting the book down.

I can’t say that I’ll be clamoring for more of Can Xue’s stories (the titular novella of this collection will have to wait), but I also can’t say that I will never read her work again. It was strangely hypnotic being sucked into this nightmarish rendering of a small Chinese village.  And, despite the horrible imagery of the previous 180 pages, the story does close with the slightest whisper of hope, a whisper that seems to suggest that even the worst nightmares end with the rising sun.

Things Fall Apart

Yesterday, I posted a link to the full text of W.B. Yeat’s Second Coming from which Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart takes its name.  In discussing the book, I think it would be appropriate to print the first stanza in its entirety.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The dark, intense imagery of these lines foreshadow the tragic fate of Achebe’s main character, Okonkwo.  Okonkwo’s father was a shiftless drunk and, from an early age, Okonkwo vowed to never, ever show even the slightest similarity to his father.  While his father let debts pile upon debts, Okonkwo paid his off in full and on time.  Where his father shunned battle, Okonkwo was a fierce warrior, taking particular pride in stories of his bloody exploits.  He beat his wives, withheld affection from his children, and even went so far as to kill a boy from a neighboring clan to whom he had developed an attachment.  All to prove that the weaknesses of his father were not the weaknesses of the son.

In his clan, Okonkwo was respected and successful.  He was married and had sons (although, his first son exhibited traits of his grandfather). He was friends with the tribal elders and was well on the way to taking the ranks which would elevate his status even further.

Then, things fell apart.  The “widening gyre” of Yeat’s falcon becomes larger and larger until Okonkwo’s life tragically collapses around him.  Blood is shed, innocence is destroyed, “the best lack conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Things Fall Apart has been described as a uniquely African novel.  I haven’t read enough African literature to make a judgement on this front.  It does take place in Africa, but I’m not certain whether the writing style itself is unique.  I can, however, understand the universal appeal of the story.  A man – strong, upright, and proud – horribly and tragically undone through his own unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing times and circumstances.  It’s a timeless story, one that has been told from antiquity through modernity.  In Achebe’s version, threads of colonialism and tribalism are woven in, but the essential theme remains the same.

I’m torn about the book itself.  While the story has tremendous relevance to today’s world and Achebe writes with great poise and elegance, I wished that it would have moved along a bit more quickly.  When I try to pinpoint what, exactly, should have moved along more quickly, I can’t.  The writing was truly economical – there wasn’t much that could have been cut or shortened.  While reading, I got the feeling that I’d read this all before in some other guise.  Which, as I mentioned earlier, is true.  The story arc is not incredibly unique.   At the same time, I did find the descriptions of tribal life and customs particularly interesting.

Things Fall Apart, whatever its narrative shortcomings (or my perceptions of such) may be, is a worthwhile read.  Its relevance hasn’t diminished over the years – while the story itself may be about an African tribesman, the real subject is human nature.  And that’s something applicable to any reader.

To Watch or Not To Watch: A Reader’s Dilemma

In his 1995 essay entitled The Reader in Exile, Jonathan Franzen begins by recounting his decision to give away his television set.

A few months ago, I gave away my television set.  It was a massive old Sony Triniton, the gift of a friend whose girlfriend couldn’t stand the penetrating whistle the picture tube emitted….I kept it in inaccessible places, like the floor of a closet, and I could get a good picture only by sitting crosslegged directly in front of it and touching the antenna. It’s hard to make TV viewing more unpleasant than I did. Still, I felt the Triniton had to go, because as long as it was in the house, reachable by some combination of extension cords, I wasn’t reading books.

The rest of the essay (found in his fantastic collection How to Be Alone) goes on to outline varying perspectives on the fate of literature in the digital age.  It’s a good essay, one I recommend to any reader.  Written before the true internet explosion of the late 90’s and early 00’s, it is remarkably prescient.  Still, while the societal implications of television versus reading are certainly fascinating, it’s the personal effects of television on the reader which interest me.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a television junkie.  I watch a dozen or so shows religiously every week and I’m constantly looking for new programming.  Sitcom, drama, documentary, whatever (although I do draw the line at reality TV – I have some standards!).  Unlike Franzen, I don’t even make an effort to curb my viewing.  Through the internet, the entire catalog of television programming, past and present, is available for my perusal and I take full advantage of it.

Like Franzen, however, I also know that it’s because of TV that I don’t read as much as I could.

Naturally, as a reader, I feel guilty about watching so much television.  But I sometimes wonder about these feeling of guilt.  Do I feel guilty because I genuinely want to spend more time reading?  Do I feel guilty because, as an educated adult, I’m ‘supposed’ to?  I certainly do wish I read more.  My TBR list is a mile long and grows faster than I keep up.  There are thousands upon thousands of masterpieces which, in the most voracious readers lifetime, will go unread.

At the same time, there is a cornucopia of crap inundating the television airwaves (or, more appropriately for our times, the television bandwidth?);  mindless programming which plays to society’s lowest common denominator and serves no redeeming intellectual or social function.  Studies show that children raised watching too much television have a harder time learning to read and write.  The obesity epidemic, especially in the United States, has undoubtedly been fueled by the inactive lifestyle that television fosters.

Yet, despite all this, I’d like to mount a defense of TV from a reader’s perspective.

There are many reasons why I read.  I read to meet new and interesting people; to travel to places I’ve never been; to place myself into situations where I would otherwise never, ever find myself.  These are the joys of reading.  They’re also the joys of watching a well-made television program.  Far from being passive entertainment for mindless slugs, well made TV can engage the viewer in the same way books engage their readers.

I won’t suggest that television (or movies, or internet shorts, or any other form of visual entertainment) could ever provide the same experience as reading a good book.  The visual medium inherently limits imaginative possibilities and this is a disadvantage that television can never overcome.  Yet, in their most basic forms, television and literature are simply two different ways of doing the same thing: telling a story.  When done well, either can help fulfill the primary function of storytelling which is to attempt to make sense of and appreciate the world we live in.

There’s nothing comparable to the intellectual stimulation and emotional satisfaction of reading a wonderful book.  If I was forced to make an absolute choice between television and reading, there’s no question which one I’d give up.  Luckily, there’s no reason to make such a choice.  For all of the television maligners, here’s a suggestion that borders on the heretical:

Close that book for a while and pick up the remote.  You might be surprised.

Looking for something to read?

The author over at The Reading Ape posted a list of what he calls The Swiss Army Ten. These are ten books which he would recommend to someone without knowing their reading preferences.  He lays out a few basic assumptions about readers who would solicit reading recommendations from him in the first place and then lists his choices.  The full post can be found here.

This is a fun mental exercise, and one that would have practical value as well.  The Reading Ape’s assumptions about his readers are a pretty good starting point for a list like this:

…the Swiss Army Recommendation also assumes a few basic things about someone asking the Ape for reading guidance, including a desire to read literary fiction (ie no Grisham or Meyer or Patterson or Sparks and so forth), a willingness for books from all over the world and from many different social and political perspectives, and at least some tolerance for difficulty.

On points two and three, I have no objections.  On the first point, however, I find that it can be hard to distinguish literary and popular fiction by author alone.  John Grisham and Stephen King both make appearances on my lists in works that I find to have genuine literary value.

Also, fiction and non-fiction are two completely different beasts with very different sets of criteria.  So, taking a cue from Rachael at A Home Between The Pages, I’ve come up with two separate lists.

With both lists, I’ve taken a more holistic approach – assuming that not everyone is going to like every book, the lists operate as whole entities, providing a variety of choices which contain works with the widest appeal.  Bear in mind that these books are not necessarily my favorites (although some of my favorite books do appear on both lists).  This is especially true on the non-fiction list:  my favorite non-fiction reading tends to have a very narrow focus and, thus, a very narrow appeal.

And, on to the lists.

Fiction

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Time to Kill by John Grisham
3. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
6. Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. Blindness by Jose Saramago
9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
10. The Stand by Stephen King

Non-Fiction

1. The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
2. Fast Food Nation by Eric Scholsser
3. The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
4. How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
5. On Writing by Stephen King
6. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
7. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
8. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
9. Lenin’s Tomb by David Remnick
10. Naked by David Sedaris

Choices, choices, choices…

I’m off on vacation this Thursday until the second week of May.  Holidays are the time when I usually get the most reading done, although this trip is going to be a bit busy.  Still, I figure I’ll be able to get through four books.  First on my list is Don Quixote. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this behemoth has been sitting on my shelf staring at me for almost a year now and guilt (as well as desire to read what most consider to be the forerunner of the modern novel) compels me to make this my priority.  For the other three slots, options abound.  Some of my choices:

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Another prize-winning book that I’ve picked up and then put back down a few chapters in.  Time to give it another go?

The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr.  A non-fiction account of an American mercenary fighting for the Emperor of China during the biggest and deadliest rebellion in human history.  Looks fascinating.

Seeing by Jose Saramago.  Follow-up to Blindness, an amazing book.  Downsides include almost complete lack of punctuation, quotation marks, paragraphs.  Makes reading a bit more arduous.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.  I have not read anything by Faulkner.  Of that, I am ashamed.  Still, after tackling Don Quixote, I’m not sure I’m going to want to jump into another dense, difficult book.

Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami. I’ve been saving this – once this one is completed, I’ll have no new Murakami material until next autumn when 1Q84 is released in English translation.

Gulag by Anne Applebaum.  This won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2004.  A book about the notorious Soviet prison camp system could be interesting, but probably not very uplifting.

So, those are my choices of which I can realistically get through three (not including Don Quixote). Suggestions are most welcome.

Sympathy for the Devil

“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste…”*

Thus begins one of my favorite classic rock songs and it should be no surprise that it was running through my head for most of the second half of Lolita. There are so many reasons for the reader not only to sympathize with Humbert Humbert, but to be pulling for him.  His tragic first love explains (while not justifying) his predilection for little girls.  He’s charming, dazzling most everyone he meets, including the reader.  Lolita often comes across as a manipulative, whiny brat. And, perhaps most importantly, H.H. seems so sincere.

After losing Lolita and furtively searching for her to no avail, he tells us “with the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love.”  He continues:

“Unless it can be proven to me – to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrification – that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.”

How can the reader not feel sympathy for this poor man?  I talked in an earlier post of Humbert’s manipulation of language to charm the reader.  That wily charm seems to be lacking here.  There are no puns, no fancy alliterations, no obscure or playful allusions.  Just an honest admission of guilt.

Or, so it would seem.  It’s easy for the reader (myself included) to forget that this story is Humbert Humbert’s story, told through his words.  This is not the work of some objective, omniscient narrator dutifully recording the facts as they occur.  This is H.H.’s world, meticulously constructed to manipulate the readers’ emotions and judgements.

A careful reading penetrates Humbert’s intricate web, revealing his true intentions and motives.   A “girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac” is spoken in the third person passive form, distancing the narrator from these despicable actions.  As we later find out, H.H. further evades responsibility for Lolita’s corruption (and rape) by transferring that burden to a doppelgänger.

At the end of his admission of guilt, Humbert claims that he can only resort to the “local palliative of articulate art” to alleviate his misery.  In H.H.’s mind, his writing, his art, is a penance of sorts.  A way to absolve himself of his responsibility.  The last line of the novel confirms this view:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.  And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

While he may, in his own twisted way, be concerned about Lolita, his primary concern is, and always has been, himself. H.H. wants to preserve his own immortality, along with that of Lolita, through his words.  And, as those words tell only his story, his immortality is created to his own liking.

We readers buy into this.  We judge Humbert Humbert on his own terms.  We justify, rationalize, sympathize, and sometimes even forgive.

“So if you see me, have some courtesy, have some sympathy and some taste…”* Readers have all this and more for Humbert Humbert, despite our better instincts.

*Sympathy for the Devil lyrics by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

the crazed

I’ve recently finished reading Ha Jin’s The Crazed. It’s a short novel about Jian, a budding PhD candidate in pre-Tiananmen China who is given the task of watching over his academic mentor (and future father-in-law) after a stroke incapacitates the old professor. A central theme of the novel is the place in modern society for artists and intellectuals. The old professor, in his stroke-fueled rantings, recounts some poetry that he claimed to have written after he was branded a “Demon-Monster” during the Cultural Revolution and sent off to a concentration camp in North-Eastern China.

If only I had ten thousand mansions
To shelter all poor scholars on earth
And brighten their faces with smiles.
Look, the mansions stand like mountains
Unshakable in the wind and rain!

Ah, once my eyes arise such mansions,
I shall be happy, even though my own but
Falls apart and I freeze to death!
(The Crazed, p 134)

Professor Yang, perhaps imagining that he’s in a classroom, lectures that this is a poem in which “authenticity overcomes artifice,” primarily because it was born through his own misery and suffering. Then, dropping his scholarly facade, Professor Yang breaks down sobbing and asking “Where are those grand mansions? When can I see them?”

For Professor Yang, the crux of the problem is this: “If truth cannot come true then what good can it do us?” For the artist and scholar, life is a constant search for and examination of the truth. In Professor Yang’s case, that search was through done through the medium of poetry (a consistent theme in Ha Jin’s books as he is an accomplished poet). Yet, at the end, Yang realizes that “it is all just full of lies…I’ve been fooled my whole life.”  There most certainly are not ten thousand mansions for Professor Yang.

One could read this as a general lamentation about the lack of appreciation and respect for scholars and artists the world over. Certainly, the struggling artist in any country feel that his or her work is unappreciated and ponders the futility of art and the elusiveness of truth in modern society. However, Ha Jin further expounds on this within the specific context of modern China. Later, Professor Yang talks to one of his colleagues about Jian, saying how he lost his chance to be a real scholar abroad by failing the TOEFL. “In our country, no scholars can live a life different from a clerks. We’re all automatons without a soul.” In Professor Yang’s (and in Ha Jin’s) view, the best that a scholar in China can hope for is to be a cog in service to the Revolution. At worst, you end up branded a Demon-Monster, an outcast from society, humiliated and scorned.

China today, of course, is a completely different place than it was in 1989 when this story takes place. However, the book was published in 2002 and it would seem from an essay published in 2008 that Ha Jin’s hasn’t tempered his bleak views of the scholar’s role in contemporary Chinese society. In an essay entitled The Censor in the Mirror, he argues that “the system of harsh censorship has crippled and ‘sterilized’ the writers and artists who exist within its field of force.” According to Ha Jin, most scholars, writers, and artists are directly dependent on the official government Writers Union which closely adheres to the principle articulated by Mao Zedong: “If they don’t listen to us, we won’t give them food.” Writers (as well as other artists and intellectuals) cannot have an existence outside of the officially delineated parameters that the government arbitrarily sets, so self-censorship is imperative for their basic survival as artists within the country.

This returns to Ha Jin’s argument in The Crazed. What is the role of the artist and, by extension, the truth, in modern Chinese society? Is it to serve the government by staying within certain prescribed boundaries and limits? Or is it to seek the truth regardless of where the truth may lie? It’s an important question and one that Ha Jin isn’t afraid to address.