One Man's Bible

One Man's Bible

“Courageous … One Man’s Bible is driven by the sweeping panorama of history and the suffering and reconciliation that underlie it.”— Washington Post Book World Published to impressive critical acclaim, One Man's Bible enhances the reputation of Nobel Prize-winning Gao Xingjian, whose first novel, Soul Mountain , was a national bestseller. One Man’s Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian’s life under the oppressive totalitarian regime of Mao Tse-tung during the period of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Whether in the “beehive” offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life everywhere is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike. One Man’s Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and how the human spirit can triumph. 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 Nobel prize winner Gao follows up his highly praised Soul Mountain with another autobiographical work, first published in Taiwan in 1999. Beginning in 1996 Hong Kong, before its handover to China, the book follows the author on a journey back in time to the heart of that country during the Cultural Revolution. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, the novel vacillates between the past and the present. Readers learn of the writer's marriage, his love/hate obsession with women and sex (which is tinged with a slight Oedipus complex), and, most of all, what it's like to live under a repressive regime. Like other fictional accounts of life during this period by authors such as Anchee Min, Ha Jin, and Pu Ning, the book is pervaded by a sense of dread and a fear of discovery. The continual changes in setting and Gao's liberal shifting from second to third person, mixed with a sprinkling of dialog throughout, add to the novel's complexity and make it a difficult work. But perhaps this is a result of the translation. Only academic and public libraries that had demand for Gao's American debut will want to consider adding this title. Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. “Unforgettable … One Man’s Bible burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling.” — New York Times “Perhaps the most powerful thing Gao has ever written.” — New York Review of Books “[Gao] paints a stark, unforgiving picture of the results of Mao’s regime and of the Cultural Revolution.” — Denver Post “Dreamlike …. elegant and haunting.” — Boston Globe “A remarkable achievement.” — Christian Science Monitor “450 brilliant pages of reflection, self-reflection and redemption.” — Ruminator Review “Conveys that profound sense of dislocation human beings can sometimes feel, when looks back on one’s own life.” — Baltimore Sun One Man's Bible is the second novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian to appear in English. Following on the heels of his highly praised Soul Mountain, this later work is as candid as the first, and written with the