I went into this one with high hopes and was disappointed. The unadorned prose that is the trademark of the author's fiction has failed him in criticism. The lectures here are artless and meandering, often more concerned with how the novels in question make Ha Jin *feel* rather than with judging them on their own merit (a cardinal sin in my book). The worst of them read like undergrad midterm essays.

The one essay I enjoyed greatly, and the reason this book gets three stars instead of two, is the one on Solzhenitsyn. Instead of regaling us with long extracts from the subject's work, Ha reaches into Solzhenitsyn's biography and examines the impact of exile on an artist's self-identity, and how that shift in identity shapes the artist's subsequent works.