The Writer as Migrant

Novelist Ha Jin raises questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world. Consisting of three interconnected essays, The Writer as Migrant sets Ha Jins own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of their birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokovwho, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writingare enlisted to explore a migrant authors conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdierefracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jins mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.