Waiting
Jin, Ha
AbeBooks Seller Since December 7, 2011
Quantity: 1AbeBooks Seller Since December 7, 2011
Quantity: 1About this Item
Winner of the 1999 National Book Award, and Pen/Faulkner award. This hardcover book is square and tight. The boards and spine have no wear with pristine gilt. The pages and endpages are clean, with no markings or folds. The dustjacket is As New. Original Price is intact. Not ex-lib. No remainder mark. Pantheon Reading Group Guide laid in. Signed by the Author on the title page without inscription. Seller Inventory # 002490
Bibliographic Details
Title: Waiting
Publisher: Pantheon
Publication Date: 1999
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Collectible; Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: As New
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: First Edition
About this title
There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters' hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is 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 gazes 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 U.S. 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
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Store Description
A. David Ruple. Southron Books, LLC. 602 East Main Street Suite D Lexington SC 29072. adruple@sc.rr.com. (803) 520-8098.
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