Gao Xingjian

A writer who has been warned to leave Beijing to avoid trouble with the authorities sets out on a journey across China, heading for a place called Ling Shang, Soul Mountain, which might or might not exist, and whose location doesn’t seem to be clear. Travelogue chapters explore the country’s diversity of landscapes, ethnicities and religions, and look at the ways different communities have been shaped by China’s long history, both locally and nationally, in particular by the violent show more events and often misguided authoritarian government policies of the last 150 years, which have also had their effects on the narrator and his family.

But this isn’t a straight travel book — for one thing, the travel chapters hop about confusingly in time and space, and for another, as the book advances they are increasingly mixed with what seem to be dream sequences and/or standalone stories, and with the development of a tentative love affair between characters called ‘he’ and ‘she’. But these also get mixed up with the narrator’s life — the ‘I’ character seems to drift into and out of the ‘he’ character, whilst the ‘you’ character is sometimes the reader, sometimes a specific listener who might be the same as ‘she’, and sometimes the narrator addressing himself. It all gets very knotty!

Gao makes it clear (in a chapter where the narrator debates with an imagined critic) that he doesn’t want the book to be read as a single, consistent narrative. It seems to be rather a multifaceted meditation on the psychological costs of maintaining an independent point of view in a world — specifically in authoritarian China — where conformity is seen as a prime requirement of good citizenship. But it goes beyond that, also looking for example at the way authoritarianism has legitimised violence against women, or the ways central control is leading to reckless destruction of the natural environment. Like 1984, it posits (sexual) love as the most effectively liberating but also most fragile gesture of resistance available to humans living in oppressive societies.

Experimental and difficult to make sense of as a novel, but a very rewarding read if you try to take it as a fascinating slideshow of 1980s China and don’t let yourself get too sucked into analysing the rest in detail. show less

Imagine having lived a life so traumatic that you are unable to consider yourself in the first person. Yes, you have managed to leave the country where those terrible events happened, but you will never come to terms with the events, the country, or yourself at that time.

This means that now you refer to yourself in one of two ways. Recounting your life, you have to use either the second or the third person. The person you were when you endured so much is “he”. The person you are now is show more “you”. There is no “I”.

Now, in Hong Kong, just before the turnover, so much comes back. Friends there ask what will happen; will they be safe? How to explain? Your French travel documents give you refugee status, so you are relatively safe. Where should your friends go?

The protagonist tried to escape all this, as he had ever since leaving China, by losing himself in sexual encounters at every opportunity, often enhanced by recounting other encounters. Here in Hong Kong, however, he may have met his match. As he said when speaking with Margarethe about the Cultural Revolution, “ only a Jewish woman with a German mind, who has learned Chinese, could possibly be interested.”

Much of this semi-autobiographical novel is concerned with this struggle to free his former self. Gao writes of his self examination, While observing and examining him unmasked, you must turn him into fiction, a character that is unrelated to you and has qualities yet to be discovered. [[…]] You do not play the role of judge, and you should not regard him as a victim[[… ]] Of interest is not your judgement nor his righteous indignation, your sorrow or his suffering, but, rather, the process of this inquiry.

The Hong Kong period works well. There is enough uncertainty in the political situation to keep the protagonist active. That may sound like an odd description, but later in the book, we find him in Europe. Since leaving China he had become a well known author and playwright, and has invitations from many countries to appear in that role. Once back in Europe though, he seems to be less engaged, almost to the point of becoming a dilettante. His former self , his “he”, is never forgotten, but now he seems unable to decide what to do as his current self, his “you”. The process breaks down. In literature as in life, there is no resolution. show less

Definitely not a book I can recommend without reservation, but on balance the parts that worked were so powerful and well-written (even in a clunky translation) that the overall experience of reading this was very very good. The main characters, whose identities are only barely distinct to start with, blend completely by the end of the novel, and so do narration of plot and philosophical musings. A personal favorite section involves "I" coming to a tomb with a hard to read inscription, which show more he purposefully misreads to make a number of absurd, and then terrifying statements about history. If a playful but paranoid and lonely mess of brilliant notes that just barely pull together around a central set of journeys and conversations sounds appealing to you, try this book out; if not, I don't blame you, but you are missing something special. show less

55. One Man's Bible by Gao Xingjian
published: 1999
format: 450 page Hardcover
acquired: 2003 from a 75% Off Books (do they still exist?)
read: Dec 14-24
rating: 4

Another dusty book on the shelf, this one has been hanging around for some 14 years with my eye on it, but with my never having any clue what it contained. After reading a few pages, I looked up a few reviews and found some really critical, especially in comparison to [Soul Mountain] (which led to his Nobel prize). These negative show more reviews were a bit unfair but perfect for lowering my expectations and allowing me to really enjoy this.

It's a lightly fictionalized memoir of Gao's experiences in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966 to Mao's death in 1976). He mixes in a life as a Chinese exile in the present (1996-1998) obviously based on him, but likely heavily fictionalized, or he was quite the promiscuous one. He is, I imagine, playful with the truth in many ways.

His life in and memories of the Cultural Revolution are insane. It's not clear to me how political involved he was, but he experienced purges that flipflopped on themselves and purge the purgers. There was no right answer except to learn to mimic everyone around you with full emotional commitment. Anything that stood out brought suspicion, which brought a lot of suffering or worse. He says that it was almost easier to try to rebel than not to, since he craved independent thought and expression. Gao is an artist in different ways, visually, in play writing and as a novelist. The cover of the book is his own art work.

There is a sophistication to how the book is presented. First in how he mixes the present and past so that they are distinct but become a whole. Part of this distinction is in how his younger self is always described in third person, but his (fictional?) current self is addressed directly always as "you". Second is in how he strives to create atmosphere. A lot of this stuff is beyond words, he has to create the experience in the text to really express it, and he does this really well. And third is the pacing. There is weak narrative drive as the each section, each chapter generally closes a story, with some notable exceptions. But it paces nicely and continuously so that it becomes a really nice to book to get lost it, and pick up anytime. It comes apart at the end where he ties off the past and then spends a lot of time about his fictional present and all his love affairs. He tells how content he is, but the impression is the opposite as it all comes out empty, and I'm not sure that wasn't his intention.

All this together made for a really enjoyable reading experience and I think a fine book that leaves the reader with a lot to think about. A writer and artist's book. And it makes me really want to read [Soul Mountain].

"You know you are certainly not the embodiment of truth, and you write simply to indicate that a sort of life, worse than a quagmire, more real than an imaginary hell, more terrifying than Judgement Day, has, in fact, existed."

2017
https://www.librarything.com/topic/260412#6295324 show less