One Man's Bible [Hardcover]

Gao Xingjian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 2002

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 same grace and beauty.

In a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao Xingjian's lover, Marguerite, stirs up his memories of childhood and early adult life under the shadow of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Gao has been living in self-imposed exile in France and has traveled to this Western-influenced Chinese city-state, so close to his homeland, for the staging of one of his plays.

What follows is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Communist regime. Whether in "beehive" offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, counterreactionaries, 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 on how the human spirit can triumph.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From 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. (Sept. 6)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (September 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066211328
• ISBN-13: 978-0066211329
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #886,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing, June 3, 2006

By 

M. Galishoff "drmlg" (Lanett, Al USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Man's Bible (Paperback)

This is a fantastic autobiographical novel about the author's experiences under Mao's China and how it affected him and others. The subject matter itself is enough to reccomend this book because we rarely get insights into this closed world and must strive to understand it as it emerges as a world economic power.

The author uses an interesting techinque of detachment where the main character is also the narrator who speeks most often in the third person. Irme Kertesz in his novel "fatelessness" beautifully dscribes how people can survive even the worst suffering, such as the holocaust, by detachment of soul from body. In "Fatelessness", the protagonist survives the concentration camps by escaping outside himself and comes to not only view his suffering and surroundings in the third person but becomes so detached that the physical pain, wounds, illness and suffering of his own body are described and experienced as a thiid person. This mode of escape was subconcious and persisted after the war, leaving a permanent scar of detachment that leaves the reader wondering how the protagonist will relate in peacetime.

Gao has evidently experienced a similar form of coping mechanism that is evident in the sections of the novel that take place in the present, during his expatriat years. It becomes manifest by his casual serial sexual encounters with women who also have similar problems of forming lasting bonds and attachments because of trauma (rape etc). Gao's inability to form a lasting personal bond extends to his lack of attachment to China, his people and his new home, career and friends. Though his insights are [rofound, Gao's emotions and actions are superficial and dream-like.

The most brilliant technique is his use of the word "you." The detached narrator (Gao)uses this word to refer to the subject (Gao)as if he is writing for and talking to himself. I have only seen this technique used in Gao's other novel translated into English "Soul Moutain." Later in the novel, when describing the past he uses "him" to describe the subject "Gao" living in Mao's China. The Narrator uses "you" to refer to the Gao in the present, expatriat state.

The use of "you" and "him" has a multilevel effect on the text and the reader. "Him" Gao of the past becomes "You" Gao of the present - a different level of detachment. "Him" Gao is the Gao of the present describing the Gao of the past as if from a distance, as if that person no longer exists and is dead or lost. The "You" Gao is more familiar, closer, intimate yet detached, a different, mature Gao of the present who is having these relationships, having his plays performed and struggling with the present novel and his past. If a man is the sum of his experiences we are left still wondering who the real Gao is and if he knows himself. It is as much a discovery of Mao's oppressive China as an effort of self descovery -- both painful.

The other effect of the use of "You" used by the narrator to describe Gao in the present is the author subtly drawing in the reader, to place him or herself in Gao's place, to become Gao. "You" also refers to the reader. We are invited to become Gao in our imagination as we read the text. The simplicity of one word creating so many layers of meaning and effect on the text and reader is on par with Jose Saramago's penchant for a lack of puntuation in many of his works.

This book is indeed something special, ingenious, and genuine. You may walk away haunted and disoriented, angry, frustrated, helpless and questioning your security. But as Gao makes clear at the begining, the experience of a Chinese mind under Mao can only be compared to the Holocaust under Hitler. Here East and West share a commonality of humanity at its best and worst, a common suffering and experience and a place to begin a dialog of understanding. Evil takes on many forms but it's effects on the human soul are universal.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cultural Drift, May 16, 2006

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Man's Bible (Paperback)

To this day, the bizarre, cult-like events of the Cultural Revolution remain a prime focal point for Chinese novelists and, especially, memoirists. Writers from Adeline Yen-Mah, Jung Chang, Jan Wong, and Anchee Min to Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Dai Sijie, and Yan Geling have plumbed the depths of political capriciousness, human debasement, and the sheer will to survive in their own lives or in those of their fictional characters. Yet few if any Chinese writers have dared examine the effects of the Cultural Revolution on their later, post-Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) lives. Gao Xingjian's semi-autobiographical novel, ONE MAN'S BIBLE, is the first I have encountered, and the results are hauntingly devastating.

The story opens in a Hong Kong hotel in 1996 with the unnamed Chinese narrator (an internationally successful playwright) and his temporary paramour, a white Jewish woman of German descent named Margarethe. Theirs is an affair of mutual convenience and simple animal lust, but it is also a continuation of two largely hopeless searches for human closeness and warmth even as both characters deny that they seek such a thing. Margarethe works insistently to draw out the narrator's past, asking him to tell his life's story and suggesting that he turn it into a book. The narrator for his part insists that such a thing is not possible, that "things in China can not be explained by language alone," yet the book of his life unfolds before us in chapters that alternate (for the first half of the book) between his present-day encounter with Margarethe and his autobiography.

What emerges from this approach is a haunting tale of a rational, intelligent man trying desperately to cope with the utter irrationality of the Cultural Revolution. At first a nonpolitical citizen of Beijing, the narrator decides that he can best survive by becoming a faction leader. Having established his revolutionary bona fides, he then lays low and chooses his moves carefully, ultimately realizing that his next move is to the countryside, to keep his head down as a peasant farmer and teacher for perhaps the rest of his life. To maintain his sanity, he secretly writes about his feelings and experiences, keeping his papers well-hidden from nosy neighbors. Over time, he discovers that survival under Mao requires repeated acts of selfishness and disregard for the feelings of others, particularly the women who pass through his life, offering sexual temptation coupled with the threat of personal ruin. Ultimately, Margarethe returns to Europe and disappears from the alternating scenes, leaving Gao to examine ever more intensely his own past, his failings and regrets and lost relationships. He never shares with us the manner in which he "escapes" from China, partly because it doesn't really matter and partly because, in a psychological sense, he will never escape.

By using the alternating chapters, the author establishes a clear divide between history and the present while simultaneously illustrating how that history impinges on the narrator's current life. Gao takes this structure even further by bifurcating the narrator himself, referring to his present-day self in the second person (you) and to his pre-escape self in the third person (he). Yet they are clearly just variations of the same person; the narrator's past is an inescapable part of his present. He is scarred for life by the Cultural Revolution, and the lonely, distant, untrusting person he has become is a direct reflection of the persona he was forced to adopt in order to survive those times. He has learned to be a soulless user of others, and little else.

This is a dark and haunting examination of life and survival during the unimaginable events of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Timed and placed in 1996 Hong Kong just before the British turnover over that island to the Communist government in Beijing, it is also a fascinating metaphorical contemplation of modern China, a nation of soulless users lusting after money the same way his narrator lusts after women. Gao Xingjian emerged from relative obscurity (at least outside of China) to become his country's surprise first Nobel Prize winner for Literature. In ONE MAN'S BIBLE, Western readers can get a sense of why he was chosen. Deservedly so, it would seem.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A bit tedious at first, but it gets better. A great novel!, October 27, 2004

By 

A. Riffo (Santiago, Chile) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Man's Bible (Hardcover)

I just finished reading One Man's Bible and loved it!

It is the story of a chinese man - a writer. Throughout his story, told by jumping to the past and back to the present, Xingjian narrates what life was like in China after Mao's Cultural Revolution and how the changes the country went through affect the lives of people.
The narrator, who refers to the main character only in third and second person, conveys the loneliness of men through these times. Despite the changes in government during Mao's time, the constant is that everyone was to be deemed an enemy, there was no one to turn to (think 1984 without the futuristic stuff), when there was always some reason to punish people.

The subsequent depersonalization that creeped into people's lives when they were not allowed to think by themselves, translated into a mechanical 'blending in' for survival, the loss of freedom in every aspect of life, and the harsh struggle to recover his individuality after all has passed, make for a great novel.

A word of advice: keep track of the character's names in a notebook and try to read something on Chinese history before delving in. It will make it easier to follow.