One Man’s Bible
Gao Xingjian author Mabel Lee translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers
Published:7th Jul '03
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The new 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.
‘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
ISBN: 9780007142422
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 30mm
Weight: 316g
464 pages