The Crazed by Ha Jin
Published 2002 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Political Fiction
How hard is The Crazed to read?
The Crazed scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 46 out of 100
- Deliberately plain English with Chinese academic and Party vocabulary rendered literally, plus fragments of classical poetry in the professor's ravings.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short, level sentences in a flat first-person voice, a style Ha Jin has said he built from writing in a second language.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Set in a hospital room and a university department, though the professor's monologues are about literature, betrayal and meaning.
- Information density: 54 out of 100
- Chinese academic politics, Cultural Revolution history and the 1989 movement are all carried in a small cast and one location.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Everything important comes through the delirium of a man who may or may not know what he is saying, filtered by a narrator who does not want to hear it.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The sickroom, the cancelled examination and the professor's Dante lecture work together as an image of a vocation eating its practitioners.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- The most truthful character is the one everyone agrees has lost his mind, and the narrator's careerism is reported without a word of judgement.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The professor dies, the massacre happens offstage, and the narrator's future is left open at the border of the book.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- A linear first-person narrative over a few months, with the professor's monologues carrying the retrospective material.
How The Crazed is regarded
The Crazed holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.