One Man’s Bible
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- $4.500
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- $4.500
Descripción editorial
A novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of international bestseller ‘Soul Mountain’. ‘Unforgettable. “One Man’s Bible” burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling.’ New York Times
Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the tentative, limited liberties of the China of the 1990s, ‘One Man’s Bible’ weaves memories of a Beijing boyhood and amorous encounters in Hong Kong with a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the communist regime – where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. A fluid, elegant exploration of memory, This novel is a profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit – and on how that spirit can triumph.
Reviews
‘Brilliant and poetic, keen and original…Gao has written a book drenched in the political turmoil in China. But his ambition is to transcend the specifics of time and place, to write a meditation on literature itself and its ability to reveal the raging, brutal, brilliant beast that is mankind…“One Man’s Bible” burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling…Unforgettable.’ New York Times
‘An absorbing historical primer on the decades of Maoist terror…Both more personal and more political than its predecessor, “Soul Mountain”, “One Man’s Bible” is a Chinese variation on an important global literary theme: the desperate quest by those living under dictatorships of all kinds to escape the crushing forces of totalitarian collectivism.’ TLS
‘Everything a novel should be…Like all good novelists Gao creates a world, not as a kind of wallpaper or filling but as a place in which the protagonist suffers and sometimes is happy.’ Literary Review
‘Dreamlike, elegant and haunting.’ Boston Globe
About the author
Gao Xingjian was born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, and has lived in France since 1987. Gao is considered an artistic innovator in his native China, both in the visual arts and in literature. He is that rare multi-talented artist who excels as a novelist, playwright, essayist, director and painter. Two novels, the internationally best-selling ‘Soul Mountain’ and ‘One Man's Bible’, are available in English, as well as a collection of short stories, ‘Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather’ and a volume of his art entitled ‘Return to Painting’.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his second novel to be translated into English, Gao combines the form of the Chinese travel journal with a novelistic technique that Milan Kundera (a kindred spirit) once labeled "novelistic counterpoint" a cadenced movement between the modes of essay, vision and story. The heart of the novel is a fragmented sequence of memories lifted from the Cultural Revolution, anchored by an unnamed "he" approximately Gao himself. The narrative often jumps forward to the present, exploring the narrator's relationships with two women: Margarethe, a German Jew fluent in Chinese, and Sylvie, an apolitical French artist. Mao's China, according to Gao, was a Hobbesian world of revenges, lynchings and millennial fervor. To be human, in that epoch, was to denounce. To be inhuman was to be denounced. The narrator/protagonist is a university-educated intellectual. He engages in an affair with Lin, a beautiful woman married to a high-ranking military official and becomes, briefly, the leader of a Red Army faction. He investigates an almost fatal blot on his files his father once owned and sold a gun and is "reformed" at a cadre "school," or labor camp. Finally, he escapes certain death in Beijing by getting transferred to a rural village. Gao, like Kundera, detects the totalitarian impulse in the politicization of everyday life, which is so easily summed up in the '70s slogan, "the personal is the political": "You want to expunge the pervasive politics that penetrated every pore, clung to daily life, became fused in speech and action, and from which no one at that time could escape." For Gao, even under the glaze of sexuality, the denunciatory animal is always lurking. When Gao won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, he was unknown in this country. This novel should justify his prize to doubters.
