One Man's Bible - Softcover

Xingjian, Gao

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060936266 ISBN 13: 9780060936266

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2003

Synopsis

One Man's Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Chinese Communist regime. Daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, and government propaganda turns citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state.

But One Man's Bible is also a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.

About this title

Review:

In the same circling, ruminative vein as his Nobel Prize-winning debut novel Soul Mountain, Chinese expatriate Gao Xingjian's fictionalized memoir of his youth, One Man's Bible, is an attempt to capture the Kafkaesque anxieties of the Cultural Revolution. As a budding writer, and the son of a white-collar worker, the unnamed narrator soon realizes that, no matter what useful friends he makes at school, he is vulnerable to investigation by the restless, politically unstable Red Guard: "Enemies had to be found; without enemies, how could the political authorities sustain their dictatorship?" Punishment for real or imagined "mistakes" of thought and behavior would have been death, imprisonment, or banishment to a labor farm. The only answer, he came to believe, was to blend in with the masses and to construct a mask of bland agreement with whoever appeared to be in charge at the time.

The bulk of Xingjian's absorbing narrative takes place in this bleak world of exposure, hysteria, and reprisals, and from an appropriately distant third-person point of view. But the act of recollection is spurred by a four-day-long affair with a near-stranger in the mid-1990s. The narrator, long exiled from China, has been brought to Hong Kong to help stage one of his plays. Here he runs into a German-Jewish woman, Margarethe, whom he knew slightly from his final years in China. For Margarethe, survival hinges on memory. It is she who persuades the narrator to let his painful, rigorously suppressed memories begin to thaw, and if not to drop his mask, at least to remember that he is wearing one. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Gao Xingjian (whose name is pronounced gow shing-jen) is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he has lived in France since 1987. Gao Xingjian is an artistic innovator, in both the visual arts and literature. He is that rare multitalented artist who excels as novelist, playwright, essayist, director, and painter. In addition to Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, a book of his plays, The Other Shore, and a volume of his paintings, Return to Painting, have been published in the United States.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060936266
• ISBN 13: 9780060936266
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464