Read about a third of it. Got less interesting as it went on. I feel like it was a parody of some writing style that I'm not familiar with.

A Chinese man living in New York gets assigned to write an article on his ex-wife’s book, which is about to be published. He is angry at her for leaving him after a three-year marriage. It is a mixture of politics, publishing, and revenge. The main character expresses a great deal of misogyny, and this gets old very quickly. I think it is intended to speak to government control and journalistic integrity. Unfortunately, it does not do so in a logical or believable way. Perhaps it is intended to be satirical. Whatever the case, I did not like it. ( )

I am endlessly fascinated by immigrant stories. It seems to me such a brave thing to leave your home country and probably some close relations to go to a foreign land. It is especially amazing to me when people who do not speak the language of the country where they are heading. This is a novel about a Chinese man who followed his wife to New York City only to find when he got there that she was living with someone else and she wanted a divorce.

Feng Danlin managed to overcome that inauspicious beginning in the USA. He is a journalist working for an online news agency and he has quite a following among expatriate Chinese and also in China. One day his boss comes to him with the news that his ex-wife has written a book and her editor says even President George Bush is interested in it because it is a story that involves the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. There is so much hype surrounding this publication and Danlin and his boss feels it cannot be true. Danlin is given the job of finding out the truth about the book. Danlin reads some of the book chapters and finds that it is very poorly written; he also learns that there is no contract for translating the book into English nor is there, as was stated by the publisher, a movie deal for over a million dollars. Danlin writes a number of articles about the falsehoods and his ex-wife and her publisher fire back. Danlin's ex-wife vows that he will be sorry because she has state support. As the days go on Danlin is drawn further into the controversy. Several times he is offered inducements to let everything go but he refuses. He thinks he has the support of his boss but eventually he is left on his own and even is fired. He remains committed to telling the truth no matter the personal consequences.

This was an interesting book in terms of how the Chinese government operates but I felt the ending was weak. ( )

Born and educated in China, Ha Jin completed post graduate studies in the US and has made a career of writing about China in English. I read his A Map of Betrayal a while ago, and came to the conclusion that the plentiful awards this writer has won, are more in sympathy with his relentlessly anti-Chinese position than for his skill in writing. I found aspects of A Map of Betrayal unconvincing, and The Boat Rocker similarly flawed.

The occasional awkwardness of Ha Jin’s writing is signalled by the title. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a native speaker of English call someone who ‘rocks the boat’, a ‘boat rocker’. It sounds wrong, IMO, and a misuse of an idiomatic expression, though I’d have to concede that maybe American usage is different. But the author’s style is generally very plain and ordinary, and it’s not IMO salvaged by occasional florid passages describing food or clothes.

But the main problem with this book is its absurd plot.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/18/the-boat-rocker-by-ha-jin/ ( )

Did not finish. Dialogue very flat, cerebral. Just couldn't maintain my interest in it.