Review: Waiting

A few months ago, I mentioned that Janice Y. K. Lee (author of listed her favorite books at her site. My local library actually had one of her recommendations so I decided to give it a try.

Lee described Ha Jin's Waiting as "deliberate, painstaking prose by a master of extrapolation." For the most part I found this blurb accurate, but what really blew me away was the author's uncanny emotional realism.

Genre: novel

Plot: Lin Kong is a man conflicted. On the one hand, he is an army doctor of a respectable rank living in a fairly large city in Communist China circa 1960s and falling in love with head nurse Manna Wu. But due to government policies and the intricacies of his own heart, he cannot divorce his country wife Shuyu with her bound feet and backwards ways, living in his hometown and caring for their daughter Hua. Each year for 17 years, Lin returns to his small village and attempts to divorce his wife. But each year he is denied. This year, he promises life will be different, but he cannot foresee all the ways his world will change.

Structure: Fairly typical structure: prologue is set in the current time, the subsequent middle chunk is set in the more distant past chronologically plowing along until the prologue's events, and the conclusion is the aftermath.

Execution: Ha Jin's prose is indeed quite deliberate, and strangely moving in its subtlety. His main strength is his ability to capture, in a more convincing way than I think I have read in a long while, the way people process situations emotionally. So often I think that we as readers fill in the gaps with a few clues that authors present, the way that our brains subconsciously fill in the words of a friend's sentence on a noisy street. But Jin's book does all the work for us, and the result is a wonderful emotional story if not a very exciting or surprising one plot wise.

It's also one of the most aptly-named books I've ever come across.
Theme: Communist China, 1950s-80s.

Read this if all the summer blockbusters have left you wanting some emotional storytelling instead of all the high-gloss explosions.

3 out of 5 stars

Other works:
He's written several poetry and short story collections, but his other novels are
In the Pond
The Crazed
War Trash
A Free Life


If you liked this, you might also like:
Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef and Lost in Translation
Janice Y. K. Lee's The Piano Teacher
Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost