Earn Nanjing Requiem Picturized By Ha Jin Exhibited In Booklet

great novel! At first I wasn't sure h'd be able to pull of thest person voice as a female protagonist, but it worked, A very touching tale of a difficult time in the history of Nanjing! I would recommend this book to anyone, especially those interested in current ChinaJapan relations, My fifth Ha Jin book, and definitely the least of the five, This isn't a novel so much as it's a list of all the horrible things the Japanese did during the rape of Nanking, an occupation that killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The event itself is important and very much undercovered in history classes, but story after story of mistreatment, assault, casual murder, and casual enslavement does not make for good fiction.
I would have been better off reading a nonfiction account, Absolutely read "The Bridegroom", but skip this one, Ha Jins latest novel, Nanjing Requiem, released last fall, takes on the huge challenge of setting a novel during the Japanese invasion and occupation of Chinas Nanjing City, It is not an easy task to write a
book with a foundation based in the torture and slaughter of thousands of civilians, but that is the challenge Jin has set up for himself with this new book.


Jin tells the story of the fall of Nanjing, opening with the heartbreaking tale of Ban, a young boy who serves as an errandrunner for the Western funded and run Jingli College, who was whisked away by Japanese soldiers and forced to do their bidding, fearing for his life if he didnt cooperate.
After this initial chapter, the rest of the book with one other short exception at the end is narrated by Anling, a Chinese woman who works for the college, While she is the primary storyteller, the roles of the foreign citizens are the focus of much of the novel,

Nanjings citizens were cruelly treated when the Japanese army overthrew the Chinese government there, as the invading armys officers allowed their soldiers to run wild, abandoning any sense of
decency and humanity.
Countless women, of all ages, were raped and killed, Men were forced to watch their relatives endure these heinous acts and then they themselves were slaughtered, Jin doesnt shy away from the realities of what occurred in city in the lates, Because of this brutally honest look at those atrocities, Nanjing Requiem can be difficult to read, His writing relays the stark realities of the horrors committed, making the book, at times, painful to endure, It is not a leisurely book, written for the feintofheart,

With the focus on the deeds of the foreigners living in Nanjing, I was disappointed that Ha Jin didnt focus more on the positive aspects of Chinese culture and traditions.
Oftentimes, the Chinese women other than the main narrator herself are made out to be petty and squabbling and wholly selfish, I would love to have seen him incorporate more Chinese women who sacrificed for the cause of helping others, The characters, both Chinese and foreign, were pretty flatly drawn, making it hard to connect with them while reading the novel,

Nanjing Requiem, while dealing with a terrible period in Chinese history, really focuses on the roles that foreigners played in saving thousands of people from certain death, These characters, mostly American missionaries, put their lives on the line for the people of the country in which they live, They show a basic humanity and dignity which is a direct foil to that characterization of the Japanese forces, With this said, the writing lacks the emotion one would expect from such a horrific event, The writing is sufficient. It describes scenes, it fleshes out characters, it has a clear beginning, middle and end, What it doesnt do is move the reader to tears or even a conjure of a great amount of anger, If I had not read several other books about the occurrences in Nanjing I would specifically recommend The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang, I dont think the absolute travesty of the situation would have been clear.
In several places, Jin provides clear descriptions of varies horrors, and yet they come across as nothing more than flatly written fiction,

Overall, this book fell short of what it could have been, I am disappointed that a book with the potential of this one didnt create more of an emotional reaction, When I initially started this novel, I
thought I was going to love it, but around the halfway mark I realized that

it was going to fall squarely in the “okay” category.
Ha Jins Nanjing Requiem earns:
SHELLS I am a huge fan of Ha Jin and his writing style, This book is one of the best he has written, at least in my mind,

The book starts out following real events in WWwith the Nanjing Massacre otherwise known as "The Rape of Nanjing" by the invading Japanese troops, I was aware of this event and it was interesting to read a fictional story based during this time period, The story follows teachers at a women's college in Nanjing that protected women during the Massacre and then follows the story throughout the war and shows how the event changed the lives of everyone at the college.


It can be a tough read at times if the reader is triggered by rape and violence since the book describes instances of rape in detail, The event does make the background to a very compelling story and it kept me reading, nonstop, through the entire book in one seating, The story is that powerful and involving, There was such potential in this novel, but the detachedness of the narrator mixed with the poorly intertwined story versus history made it difficult to have any sort of emotional involvement with the characters.
A book like this needs to be devastating to be effective and Nanjing Requiem isn't, Sadly, I don't have anything positive to say about this book, It's been on my toread list for ages, and I've long been interested in the story of the Nanjing massacre, Nanjing Requiem was a major disappointment, and it read to me as if written in the simple language of ayear old, That in itself isn't a crime, but it was also devoid of life, colour and personality,

The characters based on real people living in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation are one dimensional, and the prose is mundane and lacks heart, The emotions you would expect of people who witnessed countless atrocities perpetrated against the Chinese, are understated,

Out for a walk one day, two women who run a refugee camp in the grounds of a university come across a pond which is the dumping ground for the bodies of slaughtered men, women and children.
All the bodies had bayonet wounds, one woman had a breast cut off, a child had his head smashed in, and a few had their necks slashed, Can you imagine the horror of coming across this scene

Here's an excerpt from the book where the two women find the bodies:
, . . Beyond him lay a middleaged man, perhaps his father, shot in the face and his hands tied with gaiters his right hand had a sixth finger,
"The Japanese are savages!" I said,
"We should count how many were killed here," Minnie suggested,
"All right. "
Together we began counting, walking clockwise along the waterside, Minnie used a stick to part the reeds and pampas grass that obscured some corpses, while I recorded our count in my small notebook, .

Wow, the Japanese are savages! You think A child with his head smashed in, a women with her breast hacked off let's just do a walk around and count the bodies.
Good suggestion. That will help immensely.

The matter of fact way in which these events are recorded, is thematic throughout the book, I don't know if that was the way Ha Jin intended to write this book, but I would imagine any normal people living with these atrocities would be sickened, fearful, hysterical perhaps.
But not in this book, Everything is matteroffact. No displays of emotion. No expressions of sorrow, or anger against the Japanese, In fact at one point, a Chinese man is admonished by Minnie because he hates the Japanese, His city has just been devastated and burned, tens of thousands of people have been murdered, countless women raped and beaten and thrown away like rag dolls, and he's asked why he hates the Japanese

I had to ask myself why I persevered when it was clear that this book wasn't going to get any better.
I stuck it out forpages, and threw in the towel, I should add that I very rarely give up on a book, but life is too short to read bad novels, and I'm sure there are better accounts of this dark period of history.
This piece of dry, underwhelming, uninteresting pulp does little to illustrate the brutal reality of the Nanjing massacre,

Until the lastpages, I was ready to give this book a significantly lower rating, There are times when it feels like a ten year old wrote the book, Maybe it was intentional, the idea being English was not the native language of the narrator, But there was no feeling in there at all, which is astonishing considering the content of the book, But the lastpages grab at you, make you feel something, and make the book worth it,

Its an ok book, but you might want to skip ahead a little if you read it, Pro mě do určité míry zklamání, Historie čínskojaponské války a vůbec moderní dějiny JV Asie je u nás nepříliš známá, proto jsem byl na románové pojetí zvědavý, Deníkové pojetí mě moc nechytlo a do knihy se ne a ne dostat, Ha Jin tends to be a slow writer, I guess that's why he wrote the book Waiting which was a slow read, But that one was supposed to be,

There is only one book to read on this topic:

sitelink by sitelink sitelinkIris Chang

Iris Chang committed suicide after finishing the book.
It may not be related to the book, but it sure adds to the effect, .