War Trash [Import] [Hardcover]

Ha Jin (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: HAMILTON HAMISH (PEN (September 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0241143292
• ISBN-13: 978-0241143292
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,811,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Moving, Deeply Enriching--A Masterpiece, October 21, 2004

By 

nrofoxbabe66 (Arizona) - See all my reviews

This review is from: War Trash: A novel (Hardcover)

My god, I would have thought that a front-page review in The NYT's Book Review would have made this book a bestseller, but something is wrong with the universe. This is one of the most moving, compelling, finely-wrought works of literature I have ever read, as important as any major work of American fiction of the last 10 years. Ha Jin's novel uses the flat, subdued voice of an everyman (in this case, a Chinese POW) to explore the themes of nationalism, war, torture, survival, political relations and most of all family. The book's modest style helps make it more than ambitious, but critical. Most of all, this is an inredibly readable book, not self-conscious or fancy, but as urgent as a letter from a missing member of your own family. I urge you to read it today and remember why you started reading novels in the first place.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trapped, January 18, 2005

By 

John Sollami (Stamford, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War Trash: A novel (Hardcover)

After finishing this book, I feel finally released from the hellish nonexistence of POW life. This novel is almost unbearable in its grim, relentless depiction of the thousands of men held captive for years in Korea as they awaited the results of endless negotiations on their fates. Although their lives are individualized by the novel's narrator, Yu Yuan, an English-speaking graduate of the prestigious Huangpu Military Academy of Nationalist China, these POWs are nothing more than pawns in a geopolitical power struggle between Maoist mainland China and Nationalist China (and the U.S), represented by Chang-kai-shek and Taiwan. In the long run, no one really cares much about these thousands of displaced souls. And Yu Yuan, shifting loyalties in a dangerous but practical attempt to stay alive, finds himself trying to return to what life he had in mainland China: his old mother (he was an only child), and his fiance, who he misses terribly. But what Yu Yuan struggles to return to proves to be an illusion. Through Yu Yuan's eyes we see the corrosive effects of war, and the utter loss of identity and of meaning it produces. Although such themes have been voiced many times before in many other novels, War Trash is unique in portraying this historic period, the Korean War, and in its single-minded focus through the eyes of its all-too-human narrator.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ...No Victors, January 19, 2005

By 

Michael Jones "Book Jones" (NW of New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War Trash: A novel (Hardcover)

This important novel which masquerades as the memoir of the eponymous Yu Yuan, a Chinese POW and repatriate of the Korean conflict, may deceive you in its simplicity. It is anything but simple. There are no clear cut lines drawn, no obvious "good" or "evil" characters portrayed here. The reader is only made painfully aware of the complex politics of waging war and its profound influences on the common soldiers, the everyman, the "war trash" of this novel's title.

Ha Jin evokes a visceral hatred of war itself simply by revealing one human being's struggle in its midst. Yu Yuan faces many challenges as an English speaking Chinese POW, who yearns for his fiancée and old mother back on the mainland. Ha drags the reader through each of his hero's agonizing dilemmas only to release her with the infused notion that perhaps none of Yu's choices were made by him but, contrarily, for him.

I recommend this book wholeheartedly, not just to anyone who might deplore war and its odious affects, nor just to the "everyman" it documents, but also to those who would presume to wage war even though some of those individuals may not particularly care to read books.