The Bridegroom [Import] [Unbound]

Ha Jin (Author)

Product Details

• Unbound
• Publisher: Pantheon Press (January 2001)
• ISBN-10: 0375421203
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421204
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The strong stories make this worth the read, October 9, 2000

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bridegroom: Stories (Hardcover)

I was so excited to read Ha Jin's new collection of stories that I ordered it the day it was released, and began reading it at once. By the time I finished the third story, I was disappointed with the visible machinations of each: the forced turns of plot and the abrupt and seemingly tacked on endings. Could it be Ha Jin's editor had failed him? Fortunately, the answer is no, not entirely. While Ha Jin writes needlessly coy statements such as "It was The Old Man and the Sea, by an American author, whose name has just escaped me", he makes up for these lapses with a spare and direct prose that has a "grasshopper snapping its whitish wings in the air" and an American boss with a "stout red nose and his balding crown." The later stories are the best, with "The Bridegroom", "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town", and "The Woman From New York" being my favorites. Ha Jin's magic -his ability to see inside people - illuminates these stories, even the weaker ones, from within; he seems to reserve his talent for the hearts of the stories and not their resolutions. When he is at his best, the lack of resonance doesn't matter because getting to that final paragraph is a trip well worth taking.

I considered giving this book only three stars because of its unevenness, but to do so would be to neglect the truly fine stories inhabiting the same space. Certainly, lovers of Ha Jin's writing should read this book, as should avid readers of short stories, but hold off reading this if you haven't yet read any of the author's other works.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Refreshing Look at Another Culture", June 6, 2001

By 

Joseph J. Hanssen "Joe" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bridegroom: Stories (Hardcover)

I was delighted with these 12 short stories by Ha Jin. What a refreshing change to read about another culture, especially life in contemporary China. I learned a lot about the Chinese socialist form of living, and the different traditions and beliefs of their people. It certainly makes me appreciate more the freedom & wealth that we take for granted here in the United States. The author uses a flat writing style of simple sentences that it takes a while to adjust to. The stories do seem to end rather abruptly at times. However, this is only a small complaint from me. I stayed glued to the book until I finished it.

My favorite story, of course, was the title story, "The Bridegroom." A model husband joins a secret men's literary club and is arrested for the crime of loving other men, homosexuality. "The Woman From New York" was another favorite, about a Chinese woman who finds out things are just not the same in her hometown after an extended stay in New York. She finds she is not welcome anymore in her former life.

I think these stories held my attention and proved so interesting for the mere fact that it opened up a whole new world for me in understanding how other cultures think and rationalize everyday living. I thank my friend, Grady, for recommending this wonderful book, and now I am recommending it to you. You won't be disappointed!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some excellent, all competent, November 3, 2004

By 

JackOfMostTrades "Jack" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bridegroom: Stories (Paperback)

If you want to read some clever tales about daily life in China because the place seems too dense to tease out the individual stories, then you will probably like this collection of short stories, written by an author who grew up there, and who now writes in English. Taking as his models such writers from Checkov to the post-modernists, he does a good job of taking the masters and filtering through a cultural and personal imagination that few Westerners are privy to. My favorite is "In the Kindergarten," a truly masterful piece of writing--unpretentious and astoundingly complex if you analyze it thoroughly. The others are a bit gimmicky--epistolary stories, oddball characters and set-ups, for example, a tale of a low budget film company trying to edit a socialist/heroic film by matching shots of a hero fighting a real tiger, which, after it dies, is replaced by a man in a tiger suit. What Ha Jin seems to have done for China is similar in some respects to what post WW II Italian filmmakers did with cineam: open up a world that is hidden to many of us despite the purpoted "global village."