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よく一緒に購入されている商品
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A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate
In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.
From Publishers Weekly
Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waiting in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an migr writer's woodshedding period. It follows the fortunes of Nan Wu, who drops out of a U.S. grad school after the repression of the democracy movement in China, hoping to find his voice as a poet while supporting his wife, Pingping, and son, Taotao. After several years of spartan living, Nan and Pingping save enough to buy a Chinese restaurant in suburban Atlanta, setting up double tensions: between Nan's literary hopes and his career, and between Nan and Pingping, who, at the novel's opening, are staying together for the sake of their young boy. While Pingping grows more independent, Nanamid the dulling minutiae of running a restaurant and worries about mortgage payments, insurance and schoolingslowly snuffs the torch he carries for his first love. That Nan at one point reads Dr. Zhivago isn't coincidental: while Ha Jin's novel lacks Zhivago's epic grandeur, his biggest feat may be making the reader wonder whether the trivialities of American life are not, in some ways, as strange and barbaric as the upheavals of revolution. (Nov.)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --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 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --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。
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カスタマーレビュー
Amazon.com で最も参考になったカスタマーレビュー (beta)
Amazon.com:
41件のカスタマーレビュー
12 人中、11人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
Simple Beauty
2008/1/26
形式:ハードカバー
I found this book to be one of the most powerful books I have ever read. This book is so subtle and delicate you have to be persistent to discover its beauty. I didn't really get into it until page 75 or so (which is quite a bit of reading for a modern novel). I enjoyed the writing of the first 75 pages, Ha Jin is a wonderful writer, but it wasn't until Nan went to New York City that I really felt the story started to solidify.
This is a very artistic and highly nuanced story, and deserves to be read carefully. The story slowly unfolds and becomes more and more powerful until coming to an emotional crescendo in the journal and poems that complete the novel. Don't misunderstand me, this is a very understated tale, but for me all the more powerful for its restraint. I thought it impossible that this book would move me as much as Waiting. I was wrong. This is Ha Jin's most powerful work. I would give this book 10 stars if I could. It was that good.
This is a very artistic and highly nuanced story, and deserves to be read carefully. The story slowly unfolds and becomes more and more powerful until coming to an emotional crescendo in the journal and poems that complete the novel. Don't misunderstand me, this is a very understated tale, but for me all the more powerful for its restraint. I thought it impossible that this book would move me as much as Waiting. I was wrong. This is Ha Jin's most powerful work. I would give this book 10 stars if I could. It was that good.
16 人中、14人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
Insightful Picture of Coming to America from China
2007/12/10
形式:ハードカバー|Amazonが確認した購入
It's hard to imagine heading to a foreign country like Japan or Korea or even China to start a life with virtually no money and no real job training. Get a job, learn a language, get enough money to pay the bills, learn how a whole new culture really works. This story is well worth reading if only to reconfirm the benefits of living "A Free Life." Here are the things I found unique and interesting about the book:
1. There is really no dramatic story here. It reads like a journal describing every little thought and action including his little fights with his wife and son, everyday relationship with fellow workers, friends, poets. etc.
2. It's very description of the conservative and simple life of the regular Chinese people, those loyal to the old ways of Mao and those trying to flee from the country to start a new life in America and other places. They are willing to put in the long hours, are fiscally very very conservative, worried about every penny and investment. You understand that life is looked at from a different perspective, a perspective that you aren't entitled or worthy when you are born. You are here to work and earn enough money to pay the bills.
3. You can tell that the book is written by an intelligent, educated foreigner. It works well, flows well, is easy to understand and enjoy, but it is almost too straight forward, honest and lacks any poetry or beautiful writing. It seems like you are reading from a personal journal where comments about reactions to life's most mundane things are made. But this is part of what makes it worth reading. You comprehend the frustrations, fears, and real life of very good and devoted people. You can tell that everything that is said is from the heart and ruthfully honest. It takes him a long time to really accept and return the love his hard working devoted wife gives him from day one. He is honest about his fantasies about a girl he was once in love with and how this fantasy affects his life.
4. He opens our eyes to the evolution of China and the thoughts and desires of the Chinese people, how the older generation is still loyal to the old communist government and how the country and younger generation is becoming more and more devoted to capitalism. In a certain way, there is nostalgia for the old Chinese way of life.
5. By the end of the book, it is clear that he has become an American Citizen in all ways and living a conservative, frugal version of the American way of life. He loves it and respects it, but it is very realistically stated.
It is a long and touching story, sometimes a bit boring and slow, but always worth moving ahead. It is well worth the read and it gave me a lot of insight into these people and the sacrifices they make. Driving by Chinese restaurants run by hard working Chinese people feels different now. I want to talk to them and make friends with them and I really do respect them more now that I've had a chance to walk in one of their brother's shoes.
1. There is really no dramatic story here. It reads like a journal describing every little thought and action including his little fights with his wife and son, everyday relationship with fellow workers, friends, poets. etc.
2. It's very description of the conservative and simple life of the regular Chinese people, those loyal to the old ways of Mao and those trying to flee from the country to start a new life in America and other places. They are willing to put in the long hours, are fiscally very very conservative, worried about every penny and investment. You understand that life is looked at from a different perspective, a perspective that you aren't entitled or worthy when you are born. You are here to work and earn enough money to pay the bills.
3. You can tell that the book is written by an intelligent, educated foreigner. It works well, flows well, is easy to understand and enjoy, but it is almost too straight forward, honest and lacks any poetry or beautiful writing. It seems like you are reading from a personal journal where comments about reactions to life's most mundane things are made. But this is part of what makes it worth reading. You comprehend the frustrations, fears, and real life of very good and devoted people. You can tell that everything that is said is from the heart and ruthfully honest. It takes him a long time to really accept and return the love his hard working devoted wife gives him from day one. He is honest about his fantasies about a girl he was once in love with and how this fantasy affects his life.
4. He opens our eyes to the evolution of China and the thoughts and desires of the Chinese people, how the older generation is still loyal to the old communist government and how the country and younger generation is becoming more and more devoted to capitalism. In a certain way, there is nostalgia for the old Chinese way of life.
5. By the end of the book, it is clear that he has become an American Citizen in all ways and living a conservative, frugal version of the American way of life. He loves it and respects it, but it is very realistically stated.
It is a long and touching story, sometimes a bit boring and slow, but always worth moving ahead. It is well worth the read and it gave me a lot of insight into these people and the sacrifices they make. Driving by Chinese restaurants run by hard working Chinese people feels different now. I want to talk to them and make friends with them and I really do respect them more now that I've had a chance to walk in one of their brother's shoes.
8 人中、7人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
The immigrant story for our times
2007/12/10
形式:ハードカバー
A FREE LIFE is the immigrant story for our times. As the book opens, the reader is introduced to Pingping and Nan Wu, who have traveled cross country to pick up their six-year-old son, Taotao, whose exodus from China they have finally been able to effect. Taotao has not seen his father since he came to America to attend graduate school four years earlier. His mother left China two-and-a-half years later, leaving Taotao in the care of her parents. It is no surprise that after only several days in America, Taotao announces that he is ready to go back home to his grandparents, a fact to which it takes him a long time to become consoled.
A scholar in every aspect, Nan drops out of graduate school on the heels of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which led to meetings with fellow Chinese students where many forms of protest were discussed, including kidnapping the MIT student children of high-ranking Chinese officials. After a fairly standard protest in DC, Nan returns disenchanted, disturbed and determined to give up his graduate studies in the field of Political Science, a field chosen for him by his government.
The family now begins a long evolution. Previously, Nan had envisioned a future involving books, letters, poetry and the mind. Now, forgoing his student stipend, earning a living and establishing a life that provides both security and financial independence for his family becomes a necessity.
From serving as caretaker in a wealthy, divorcee doctor's home (with Pingping), to working as a security guard, to factory work, restaurant service in New York and other various jobs, Nan becomes a downright, sometimes downtrodden, blue-collar American immigrant worker. Underneath it all is the support and frugality of Pingping. Her intensity to provide for both today, tomorrow and the future often dominates everything. The family eventually finds themselves in possession of a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta, a decent home they pay off very quickly and a son with whom they seem to never make a connection.
Through it all, Nan's dream of literary success never wanes. Nor do his thoughts of Beina, the lover with whom he broke years earlier. While much of the books 600 pages is devoted to the everyday struggles of this family while pursuing what is, for them, the American dream of home and business ownership and --- more importantly --- no debt, there arrives a climax as Nan forces himself to come to terms with the decisions he has made, the paths he could have taken and the choices he still could make. Watching his return to China to confront the ghosts of his past, and a journey to Iowa to face what could have been his future, is a jumble of emotions for both Nan and the reader.
Pingping's ceaseless devotion to Nan, her acceptance of his half-love for her, a late-in-life pregnancy and more combine to make her a sympathetic character who carries the weight of the entire family's emotions on her shoulders. Jin often pits the couple against each other, and most often, one must root for Pingping.
The final 30 pages of the book are titled "The Poems of Nan Wu." These are presented as the poetry Nan has been scribbling all these years, some of which he sent to publishers and schools such as the Iowa Writer's Workshop. These pages are so beautiful and so insightful that they establish a side of Nan, a glimpse inside him, that has evaded the reader up until then. Taken with the end of the book, they provide redemption for Nan and a depth to the man around whom this novel revolves.
There are so many other storylines within these pages, it is hard to truly do justice in so few words. Yes, it is an ordinary tale of relatively ordinary lives, but it is their story and Jin makes you really care about these lives, whatever may happen in them. It is a book I find myself thinking about even now, months after putting it down. I handed it off to a very well-read teacher friend at a baseball tournament our sons were playing in. On the third day of the tourney, she handed it back, praising it effusively and scolding Jin for "keeping her up too late." We watched our boys play baseball, living out the American dream in Cooperstown, New York, while --- side by side --- we both contemplated the version of that same dream that Jin had painted. I truly feel that A FREE LIFE should be considered now, and for a long while, to be the voice of the immigrant experience of our time.
--- Reviewed by Jamie Layton
A scholar in every aspect, Nan drops out of graduate school on the heels of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which led to meetings with fellow Chinese students where many forms of protest were discussed, including kidnapping the MIT student children of high-ranking Chinese officials. After a fairly standard protest in DC, Nan returns disenchanted, disturbed and determined to give up his graduate studies in the field of Political Science, a field chosen for him by his government.
The family now begins a long evolution. Previously, Nan had envisioned a future involving books, letters, poetry and the mind. Now, forgoing his student stipend, earning a living and establishing a life that provides both security and financial independence for his family becomes a necessity.
From serving as caretaker in a wealthy, divorcee doctor's home (with Pingping), to working as a security guard, to factory work, restaurant service in New York and other various jobs, Nan becomes a downright, sometimes downtrodden, blue-collar American immigrant worker. Underneath it all is the support and frugality of Pingping. Her intensity to provide for both today, tomorrow and the future often dominates everything. The family eventually finds themselves in possession of a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta, a decent home they pay off very quickly and a son with whom they seem to never make a connection.
Through it all, Nan's dream of literary success never wanes. Nor do his thoughts of Beina, the lover with whom he broke years earlier. While much of the books 600 pages is devoted to the everyday struggles of this family while pursuing what is, for them, the American dream of home and business ownership and --- more importantly --- no debt, there arrives a climax as Nan forces himself to come to terms with the decisions he has made, the paths he could have taken and the choices he still could make. Watching his return to China to confront the ghosts of his past, and a journey to Iowa to face what could have been his future, is a jumble of emotions for both Nan and the reader.
Pingping's ceaseless devotion to Nan, her acceptance of his half-love for her, a late-in-life pregnancy and more combine to make her a sympathetic character who carries the weight of the entire family's emotions on her shoulders. Jin often pits the couple against each other, and most often, one must root for Pingping.
The final 30 pages of the book are titled "The Poems of Nan Wu." These are presented as the poetry Nan has been scribbling all these years, some of which he sent to publishers and schools such as the Iowa Writer's Workshop. These pages are so beautiful and so insightful that they establish a side of Nan, a glimpse inside him, that has evaded the reader up until then. Taken with the end of the book, they provide redemption for Nan and a depth to the man around whom this novel revolves.
There are so many other storylines within these pages, it is hard to truly do justice in so few words. Yes, it is an ordinary tale of relatively ordinary lives, but it is their story and Jin makes you really care about these lives, whatever may happen in them. It is a book I find myself thinking about even now, months after putting it down. I handed it off to a very well-read teacher friend at a baseball tournament our sons were playing in. On the third day of the tourney, she handed it back, praising it effusively and scolding Jin for "keeping her up too late." We watched our boys play baseball, living out the American dream in Cooperstown, New York, while --- side by side --- we both contemplated the version of that same dream that Jin had painted. I truly feel that A FREE LIFE should be considered now, and for a long while, to be the voice of the immigrant experience of our time.
--- Reviewed by Jamie Layton
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