One Man's Bible

Description:
the new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of international bestseller Soul Mountain The unnamed narrator of this book recalls his Beijing boyhood, his tenth birthday, the death of his grandfather, the accidental drowning of his mother and the effect all this trauma had on the frail, sensitive young boy he was then. He then pulls us forward in time to view the sexually active adult he has become, engaged in a series of difficult relationships, in constant trouble with the Chinese authorities, and in danger of being marked out as a 'counter-revolutionary'. The book moves between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution insanities of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the tentative, limited liberations of the 1990s, and the narrator moves between China, Hong Kong, Paris and Frankfurt. Through it all throbs an overwhelmingly powerful sense of the past, distant and near, and a moving and unprecedented insight into the character of modern China. Gao has his narrator say of the book's purpose: 'Your writing is not in the cause of pure literature, but you're also not a fighter using your pen as a weapon to promote right, moreover you don't know what's right. You know you're certainly not the embodiment of right and you write simply to indicate that a sort of life worse than a quagmire, more real than an imaginary hell, more terrifying than the judgement of the last day has existed. Furthermore, it's highly likely that after people have forgotten about it, it will make a comeback, and people who've never gone crazy will go crazy again, and people who've never been oppressed will oppress or be oppressed. This is because madness has existed since the birth of humanity.'

Review:
Reviews for Soul Mountain: 'Bristles with narratives in miniature -- stories from ancient Chinese history, folk tales, childhood reminiscences, memories of the Cultural Revolution, as well as bitter arguments and passionate sex. Gao's aim is to represent 'the ineffability of life', and, as far as that is possible to do, he has done it in this complex, rich and strange novel.' Independent on Sunday Gao's portraits of fellow wanderers, farmers and party officials are vivid and shine a light on their place and time. The language (wonderfully translated by Mabel Lee) is luminous and tactile... There's a feeling of entering and moving through a place we had seen only through mist.' Time Out 'When he writes of his experiences in the real world, Gao transcends cultural barriers. A good story will out in any language, and when Gao is good he is staggeringly so. His writing about the Cultural Revolution is remarkable.' Daily Telegraph 'There is a sense throughout that Gao is running after things that are already vanishing. On the nature reserves, people are shooting bears and even pandas; trees are being cut down a hundred times faster than before. Stones inscribed with historical inscriptions have been dynamited to yield materials for bridges that were never built... Soul Mountain is Gao's attempt to bring back what is lost. In the end, his gift is to look beyond politics at the human condition, offering no easy explanations and refusing artificial allegiances.' Sunday Times

Author Biography:
Gao Xingjian was born in 1940, in China. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote a number of works of prose, plays and poems, aware that what he wrote could not be published, since they failed to comply with the government's strict guidelines. He was finally able to publish a substantial number of works during the 1980s, but when a ban was imposed on the performance of his play Bus Stop in 1983, Gao finally fled Beijing and began the long journey of a political refugee which forms the basis of Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible. He now lives in Paris, where he writes and paints, and is a French citizen.