As I sit at my desk typing this out, there's a man thousands of miles away locked up somewhere in the darkest recesses of China's prison system, silently keeping tabs on the days that morph into months and the months that morph into years. His name is Liu Xiaobo and it has been 4 years since he has ceased to be a free man, sentenced to an 11-year term because he dared to have an opinion of his own.And while reading this harrowing autobiographical novel, my thoughts were with Liu and the other anonymous activists who are either biding their time as political prisoners or quietly carrying on with their peaceful agitation against the brute force of the state. Before a Mo Yan there was a Gao Xingjian, the first man of Chinese origin to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But being a French citizen, his Nobel win went virtually unnoticed in China. The Chinese Premier at the time had only casually congratulated not him but the ability of Chinese literature to appeal to the sensibilities of readers of the world only when asked in an interview about it.One Man's Bible, Gao's most noted work of fiction besides Soul Mountain, resonates with so much repressed grief and bitterness that it becomes difficult to accompany the narrator on his solemn promenade down memory lane, especially since this memory lane, strewn with the wreckage of a past life, only evokes horror of the most potent kind. The stark horror of your idea of home being replaced by the idea of a prison, a dark and suffocating one limiting your movements and your field of vision, of being deprived of your free will, of being forced to burn the fruits of your hard work to escape persecution, of having to helplessly witness the complete annihilation of your family.This fictionalized memoir is Gao's attempt at purging himself of all the horrific happenings he witnessed after Mao came to power and making peace with the monster that lurks somewhere at the back of his mind. The monster of his past. The book chronicles the darkest years of his experiences with the onset of the Cultural Revolution and his eventual flight to France in search of the liberties he was denied at home. But in addition to being deeply cathartic, this is also a homage to the resilience of the human spirit and its capacity to resist the forces of political oppression.The narrative contains some truly hair-raising descriptions of the reign of terror carried out by the Red Guards (the paramilitary youth brigade who were given the right to freely suppress the slightest hint of criticism with ruthless violence). Some of their forcefully instituted rules were so ridiculous that they would have been almost funny had they not brought such disastrous consequences upon millions of unsuspecting, innocent citizens. For instance:- "...as two of his articles had been published, in English, in an international students' mathematics journal just before that anticulture Cultural Revolution broke out, he was sent for eight years to herd cattle on a farm."Gao continuously refers to his past self in the third person, in an effort to distance himself from the the land of his birth and the youthful idealism which once spurred him on to oppose many of the nonsensical, unjust policies implemented by Mao's regime. Now he no longer plays a slave to his moral righteousness and merely seeks his salvation through art. Quite unconventionally, he uses the second person to refer to himself in the present almost giving the impression that his true self was lost somewhere in this transition from a young Chinese university student harboring literary passions to a disillusioned, faithless citizen of the world only seeking to live out the rest of his days in peace. He is neither here nor there, stuck in a no man's land with an ambiguous identity.Gao's memories of China during the Cultural Revolution are interspersed with his present day experiences as an émigré in Paris and snippets of his career as a playwright and writer. At times it seems the terrible memories of his past have caused him to value only personal freedom and become indifferent to everything else - fame, recognition and even a national identity. He stresses repeatedly on how he doesn't believe in any fancy '-isms' anymore. Right and left leanings, ideologies have become hollow ideas to him which are eventually used to manipulate society into some form of servitude.It is ironic that the man who has been the author of a generation's miseries has his face printed on the Yuan while the real China is being hidden and kept under wraps of a glossy identity of an emerging superpower. I am sure there's a China unknown to the rest of the world, not the China of the numerous Olympic medals or the China represented by the robotically expressionless faces of the Communist Party members. Not the China of the formidable military capabilities, an expanding GDP and the significant strides in space science. But the China of the intellectuals, the China of the writers, the China of the historians who are at present clamoring to be given the right to critically analyze the glossed over aspects of Mao's rule for academic benefit, the China of the courageous dissidents demanding civil liberties and the China of the commoners, too scared to speak up. "...there is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom." - Liu Xiaobo Call me a fan of social justice or a staunch believer in the idea of redemption but I think the ghost of oppression will be exorcized and Mao's legacy will eventually be consigned to the annals of history devoted exclusively to recording the misdeeds of a handful of tyrants. The unknown, unheard of China will rise some day and Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng, Gao Xingjian and the unnamed ones who were brave enough to raise their voice against the very outrageous denial of freedom of thought and expression, will find their rightful immortality. Something tells me they already have.
I was torn between giving this 3 stars, but just couldn't. Once again I am mystified at the Noble Prize for this author - hopefully his plays which he is most noted for is the reason for the award or may be the committee just needed a Chinese writer to make the awards look more balanced and Gao was the only one they could find that was being published in the West. Not sure if it was his intention or if it was a poor translation which made the narrative shift in tense and point of view. The novel is autobiographic fictional telling the of the author's life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Repression is the main theme of the novel - repression in thought, creativity, language and emotion. Gao is obsessed with sex - even this was controled by the Party. The novel was interesting in light of our own government's spying, in that the author wanted to have a place where he could have sex with whomever he wanted and no one could see or overhear him. "The girl had not deliberately set out to harm him,....The more passionate a woman, the more she had to confess..., it was like the religiously devout need to confess the secrets of their inner hearts to a priest...., in those revolutionary years even women were revolutionized into lunatices and monsters."He also wanted a place where he could think, write, and speak without it coming back to be used against him as an enemy of the state. The saddest part of the book is when the protagonist has to burn all of his writings in fear that it could incriminate him. Even after the narrator was in exile, he feared the long reach of China into his life and work.For those who would like to know what it was like in China for writers, all people in fact, during the Mao years this is worth a read, especially if you are afraid of where our country is headed in terms of censorship - where every word and thought has to scrutinized for polictiacal correctness. "In the early morning, the corridors of the building were covered in new posters, there had been a change in the political climate: today was right and yesterday was wrong, people had turned into chameleons."
What do You think about One Man's Bible (2003)?
Hard to do justice to a book that somehow balances the dialogue between individual and history. At home simultaneously drawing from the most ancient of Confucian texts as well as the dilemmas and aporias of postmodernism, this is a great novel for anyone looking to not quite get out of the Western circle of literature...meaning, if you're looking for a dialectic of "East" and "West", then this is something to pick up. Not quite Western and not quite Chinese...wonderfully breaks down the grand narratives of both cultures...
—Duncan
Dos voces, la del dramaturgo exiliado en Francia que viaja por el mundo (Hong Kong, Australia, sur de Francia, Barcelona) y la del joven funcionario arrastrado por la locura colectiva de la Revolución Cultural que le lleva de Pekín a una aldea al sur de la China, y una misma persona, el hombre solo, aquél que descubre la vacuidad de las ideologías y las religiones y busca en sus amantes una temporal conexión con otros seres humanos.Sin concesiones, sin sentimentalismos, sin ambages. ¿Una historia triste? Sí y no, triste porque muestra la estupidez humana, llevada hasta extremos insospechados en la China maoista, pero tampoco demasiado, puesto que al final el protagonista sale adelante, liberado, eso sí, de cualquier esperanza que no sea la esperanza en la supervivencia, en su propia fuerza vital. Reeducado, pero no en el sentido que quisieron darle los cuadros del Partido.
—Iñaki Tofiño
I can't say that I enjoyed this book but it did make me more aware of what it must be like to live under a totalitarian state. In Stasiland by Anna Funder Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Funder is the narrator, an outsider viewing with shock, amusement, compassion or disbelief, but even an author as perceptive as she is cannot convey what it is like to be subject to the intellectual confusion it occasions.Xingjian does. His narration seems first hand, written with a sense of immediacy through dialogue between Margarethe the German Jew and Xingjian's man who has fled the Cultural Revolution.The lovers talk in the present, and they try to get each other to talk about the past. This dialogue is in the 3rd person, breaking into first person as the narrator reflects. It can be irritating, this constant use of 'You say' as the narrator reports what he's said to Margarethe, but after a while I realised that the effect is to show the gulf between what is said, even in intimate moments, and what is thought. A habit learned for self-preservation.Chapters set in the past, in the Cultural Revolution, are written in a detached 3rd person voice. Here the impersonal observer describes events as Funder would - not as a participant but as a disapproving reporter of the absurdity of the regime.What does it do to a fine mind to be subject to endless propaganda, slogans, re-education sessions and capricious reversals of dogma? Everyone lives in a socio-political world and needs to be able to comment on it somehow, but for a very intelligent person it is vital to their sense of self. To be put in very confined spaces and forced to participate in bizarre denouncements of counter-revolutionary thought would be torture. Xingian's protagonist craves living in a peasant village, just to have a little space.I began to wonder if the reason the book is called 'One Man's Bible' is because it's a play on the way the Bible has permeated individual thought to become part of personal being. Even for non-religious people, the Christian Bible is the basis of most Western cultures because of its themes of individual choice and responsibility, forgiveness and compassion. Its stories (the Flood, the Tower of Babel etc) permeate literature; its symbols permeate art.In the Cultural revolution, consciousness had to keep shifting to keep pace with the Leadership's pronouncements. So one had to try to maintain one's own intelligent perspective but risk sharing it with no one. Yet one also had to participate in the propagandising sufficiently well to be able to parrot the required statements and harass fellow-citizens enough to survive without becoming confused about what was required this particular week. Imagine having to put intellectual energy into that! How degrading!!
—Lisa
