The Other Shore [Paperback]

Gao Xingjian (Author), Gilbert C. F. Fong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1999

When Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, he became the only Chinese writer to achieve such international acclaim. The Chinese University Press is the first publisher of his work in the English language. Indeed, The Other Shore is one of the few works by the author available in English today. The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian contains five of Gao's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). With original imagery and in beautiful language, these plays illuminate the realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile. The plays also show the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance. An introduction by the translator describes the dramatist and his view on drama.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Born and educated in China, Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962. He became a resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre after the Cultural Revolution. His plays have been performed all around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. The Other Shore was banned in China in 1986 and since then none of his plays have been performed there. He settled in France in 1987 where he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000.Gilbert C. F. Fong is an associate professor in the department of translation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and is heading a research project on the history of Hong Kong drama. He is also the editor of the monographs Studies on Hong Kong Drama and Plays from Hong Kong, and of the journal Hong Kong Drama Review.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: The Chinese University Press (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9622018629
• ISBN-13: 978-9622018624
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #335,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Chinese
  • #89 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Language Nonfiction > Chinese

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nobel Press Release, October 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Other Shore (Paperback)

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000 goes to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian

"for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama".

In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses. He is a perspicacious sceptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.

His great novel Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves. It is based on impressions from journeys in remote districts in southern and south-western China, where shamanistic customs still linger on, where ballads and tall stories about bandits are recounted as the truth and where it is possible to come across exponents of age-old Daoist wisdom. The book is a tapestry of narratives with several protagonists who reflect each other and may represent aspects of one and the same ego. With his unrestrained use of personal pronouns Gao creates lightning shifts of perspective and compels the reader to question all confidences. This approach derives from his dramas, which often require actors to assume a role and at the same time describe it from the outside. I, you and he/she become the names of fluctuating inner distances.

Soul Mountain is a novel of a pilgrimage made by the protagonist to himself and a journey along the reflective surface that divides fiction from life, imagination from memory. The discussion of the problem of knowledge increasingly takes the form of a rehearsal of freedom from goals and meaning. Through its polyphony, its blend of genres and the scrutiny that the act of writing subjects itself to, the book recalls German Romanticism's magnificent concept of a universal poetry.

Gao Xingjian's second novel, One Man's Bible, fulfils the themes of Soul Mountain but is easier to grasp. The core of the book involves settling the score with the terrifying insanity that is usually referred to as China's Cultural Revolution. With ruthless candour the author accounts for his experiences as a political activist, victim and outside observer, one after the other. His description could have resulted in the dissident's embodiment of morality but he rejects this stance and refuses to redeem anyone else. Gao Xingjian's writing is free of any kind of complaisance, even to good will. His play Fugitives irritated the democracy movement just as much as those in power.

Gao Xingjian points out himself the significance for his plays of the non-naturalistic trends in Western drama, naming Artaud, Brecht, Beckett and Kantor. However, it has been equally important for him to "open the flow of sources from popular drama". When he created a Chinese oral theatre, he adopted elements from ancient masked drama, shadow plays and the dancing, singing and drumming traditions. He has embraced the possibility of moving freely in time and space on the stage with the help of one single gesture or word - as in Chinese opera. The uninhibited mutations and grotesque symbolic language of dreams interrupt the distinct images of contemporary humanity. Erotic themes give his texts feverish excitement, and many of them have the choreography of seduction as their basic pattern. In this way he is one of the few male writers who gives the same weight to the truth of women as to his own.

The Swedish Academy

79 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rare Chinese Drama Acceptable For US Production, July 20, 2000

By 

NY Director (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Other Shore (Paperback)

Gao Xingjian has written some really provacative interesting drama for performance. The Other Shore is the best play available that presents the atmosphere and message of the horrors of the Maoism and the Cultural Revolution in a way that can be understood by people with no knowledge of Chinese history. Very interesting, Beckett-ish work just waiting to be performed.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Offerings from the Chinese Master, October 16, 2000

By 

Chinmay Hota (Planet Earth) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Other Shore (Paperback)

Gao Xingjian's artistic sensibility was chiselled out of his double frustration of public condemnation and private shock.

After being established as a prominent Chinese playwright, he suddenly fell out of grace of the communist authorities, who dubbed his works as `Spiritual Pollution'. At that time he was also undergoing an intense personal trauma, being diagnosed, wrongly, with lung cancer. He set out on an extensive journey to the heart of China covering 5 months and 15,000 kilometres which helped him rediscover his self and his countrymen and helped change his world-view.

Although a direct outcome of this emotional journey was the phantasmogoric novel `Soul Mountain', the present five plays also bear testimony to his broadened horizon.

In his plays the mythical finds place with the real, as he tries to make sense of the diversity of his land's culture and its people. Gao tries to mask the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in a set of highly original imagery. The symbolism sometimes obfuscates the proceedings, but the stark realism of the human drama comes back again and again. Some of Gao's views, on man woman relationship for instance, may not be palatable to the Western sensibility, but one has to understand the vast compass that he is handling in these plays.

Out of the five plays `The Other Shore' and `Nocturnal Wanderer' are the most gripping. But all the five plays reflect the yearning of the individual to break lose from the stifling collective memory.