内容説明
"In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know."--Judges' Citation, National Book Award
"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review
"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post
"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times
"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune
"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?
"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review
"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post
"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times
"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune
"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?
"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
内容（「BOOK」データベースより）
毎夏、軍医の孔林は妻を離婚しようとして帰省しては失敗していた。妻、淑玉には愛情を感じたことはなく、いまや林は看護婦の呉曼娜を愛している。そのため、離婚を申請しに人民法院へ出向くのだが、淑玉は裁判官の前に立つと最後の最後になって考えを翻すのだった。だが軍規により、別居が18年を過ぎれば、相手の同意がなくても離婚は成立する。林と曼娜は、ひたすらその日を待ち暮らして耐えた。遂に離婚が成立し、林は晴れて曼娜との新生活を始める。だが、ようやくつかんだ幸せも束の間、二人に次々と困難が降りかかる…。日常のふとした瞬間につまづいたことで、待ち続けた歳月の虚しさに直面した男の焦燥を巧みに描き、アメリカ文壇に衝撃を与えた傑作。人生の意味を問い直す男の痛恨の思いを描く全米図書賞、PEN/フォークナー賞受賞作。
内容（「MARC」データベースより）
18年間求めてきた離婚がついに成立し、孔林(クオン・リン)は愛人と新生活を始めるが…。思わぬことから、待ち続けた歳月の意味に愕然とする男の焦燥を巧みに描く。全米図書賞、PEN/フォークナー賞受賞作。
Amazon.com
"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
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
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
From Publishers Weekly
Jin's quiet but absorbing second novel (after In the Pond) captures the poignant dilemma of an ordinary man who misses the best opportunities in his life simply by trying to do his duty—as defined first by his traditional Chinese parents and later by the Communist Party. Reflecting the changes in Chinese communism from the '60s to the '80s, the novel focuses on Lin Kong, a military doctor who agrees, as his mother is dying, to an arranged marriage. His bride, Shuyu, turns out to be a country woman who looks far older than her 26 years and who has, to Lin's great embarrassment, lotus (bound) feet. While Shuyu remains at Lin's family home in Goose Village, nursing first his mother and then his ailing father, and bearing Lin a daughter, Lin lives far away in an army hospital compound, visiting only once a year. Caught in a loveless marriage, Lin is attacted to a nurse, Manna Wu, an attachment forbidden by communist strictures. According to local Party rules, Lin cannot divorce his wife without her permission until they have been separated for 18 years. Although Jin infuses movement and some suspense into Lin's and Manna's sometimes resigned, sometimes impatient waiting—they will not consummate their relationship until Lin is free—it is only in the novel's third section, when Lin finally secures a divorce, that the story gathers real force. Though inaction is a risky subject and the thoughts of a cautious man make for a rather deliberate prose style (the first two sections describe the moments the characters choose not to act), the final chapters are moving and deeply ironic, proving again that this poet and award-winning short story writer can deliver powerful long fiction about a world alien to most Western readers. (Oct.) FYI: Jin served six years in the People's Liberation Army, and came to the U.S. in 1985.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。
Book Description
"In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know."--Judges' Citation, National Book Award
"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review
"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post
"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times
"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune
"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?
"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review
"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post
"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times
"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune
"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?
"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
From the Back Cover
"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."
-- Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?
"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."
-- Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
"A deceptively simple tale, written with extraordinary precision and grace. Ha Jin has established himself as one of the great sturdy realists still writing in a postmodern age."
-- Kirkus Reviews
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
-- Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?
"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."
-- Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
"A deceptively simple tale, written with extraordinary precision and grace. Ha Jin has established himself as one of the great sturdy realists still writing in a postmodern age."
-- Kirkus Reviews
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
著者について
Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award, and War Trash, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize; the story collections The Bridegroom, which won the Asian American Literary Award, Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award; the novels The Crazed and In the Pond; and three books of poetry. His latest novel, A Free Life is his first novel set in the United States. He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
War Trash, The Crazed, The Bridegroom, Waiting, In the Pond, and Ocean of Words are available in paperback from Vintage Books. --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
War Trash, The Crazed, The Bridegroom, Waiting, In the Pond, and Ocean of Words are available in paperback from Vintage Books. --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。
著者略歴 (「BOOK著者紹介情報」より)
ジン,ハ
1956年、中国遼寧省生まれ。人民解放軍に6年間在役。1985年に渡米、ブランダイス大学で英米文学の博士号を取得。英語で書くようになって10年あまりで書いた本書『待ち暮らし』で、1999年の全米図書賞、2000年のPEN/フォークナー賞に輝くという快挙を遂げた。著書に、2冊の詩集Between Silences(1990)とFacing Shadows(1996)がある。短篇小説集では、Under the Red Flag(1997)でフラナリー・オコナー賞を、Ocean of Words(1998)でPEN/ヘミングウェイ賞を受賞している。また、2000年には短篇集The Bridegroomを上梓した。長篇小説は、本書のほかにIn the Pond(1998)がある。現在はエモリー大学で教鞭を執るかたわら、旺盛に執筆活動をつづけている(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)
1956年、中国遼寧省生まれ。人民解放軍に6年間在役。1985年に渡米、ブランダイス大学で英米文学の博士号を取得。英語で書くようになって10年あまりで書いた本書『待ち暮らし』で、1999年の全米図書賞、2000年のPEN/フォークナー賞に輝くという快挙を遂げた。著書に、2冊の詩集Between Silences(1990)とFacing Shadows(1996)がある。短篇小説集では、Under the Red Flag(1997)でフラナリー・オコナー賞を、Ocean of Words(1998)でPEN/ヘミングウェイ賞を受賞している。また、2000年には短篇集The Bridegroomを上梓した。長篇小説は、本書のほかにIn the Pond(1998)がある。現在はエモリー大学で教鞭を執るかたわら、旺盛に執筆活動をつづけている(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)
