One Man's Bible

Literature & Fiction

Gao, Xingjian

Contemporary

Flamingo

FIRST FLAMINGO EDITION. 2003 trade paperback, Xingjian Gao (Soul Mountain). The author's 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.

History & Criticism

From China's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature comes an exquisite new book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English. A young couple on honeymoon visit a beautiful temple up in the mountains, and spend the day intoxicated by the tranquillity of the setting; a swimmer is paralysed by a sudden cramp and finds himself stranded far out to sea on a cold autumn day; a man reminisces about his beloved grandfather, who used to make his own fishing rods from lengths of crooked bamboo straightened over a fire...Blending the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, these stories hum with simplicity and wisdom -- and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

Harpercollins

Perennial

In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death.But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer—he had won "a second reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.
Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Moutain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.

Soul Mountain

Religion & Spirituality

Harper-perennial

In 1983 Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian (pronounced gow shing-jen) was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death. But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer -- he had won "a reprieve from death" and had been thrown back into the world of the living. Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing. He traveled to the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China and from there back to the east coast, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometers over a period of five months. The results of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.
A bold, lyrical, prodigious novel, Soul Mountain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor. Interwoven with the myriad of stories and countless memorable characters -- from venerable Daosit masters and Buddhist nuns to mythical Wild Men, deadly Qichun snakes, and farting buses -- is the narrator's poignant inner journey and search for freedom. 
Fleeing the social conformity required by the Communist government, he wanders deep into the regions of the Qiang, Miago, and Yi peoples located on the fringes of Han Chinese civilization and discovers a plethora of different traditions, history, legends, folk songs, and landscapes. Slowly, with the help of memory, imagination, and sensory experience, he reconstructs his personal past. He laments the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the ecology -- both human and physical -- of China. And in a polyphony of narrating selves -- the narrator's "I" spawns a "you," a "she," and a "he," each with a distinct perspective and voice -- the novel delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.
Storytelling saves the narrator from a deep loneliness that is part of the human condition. His search for meaning -- in life, in the journey -- turns up the possibility that there may be no meaning. The elusive Lingshan ("Soul Mountain"), which becomes the object of his quest, never yields up its secrets, but the journey is a rich, strange, provocative, and rewarding one. Soul Mountain is a novel of immense wisdom and profound beauty.

United States

Harper

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

PerfectBound

When Gao Xingjian was crowned Nobel Laureate in 2000, it was the first time in the hundred-year history of the Nobel Prize that this honor had been awarded to an author for a body of work written in Chinese. The same year, American readers embraced Mabel Lee’s translation of Gao’s lyrical and autobiographical novel Soul Mountain, making it a national bestseller. Gao’s plays, novels, and short fiction have won the Chinese expatriate an international following and a place among the world’s greatest living writers. The bold and extraordinary essays in this volumeall beautifully translated by sinologist Mabel Leeinclude Gao's Nobel Lecture (The Case for Literature”), Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth,” Cold Literature,” Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain,” and The Necessity of Loneliness,” as well as other essays. These essays embody an argument for literature as a universal human endeavor rather than one defined and limited by national boundaries. Gao believes in the need for the writer to stand apart from collective movements, regardless of whether these are engineered by political parties or driven by economic or other forces not related to literature. This collectionpresents Gao's innovative ideas on aesthetics, and it constitutes the very kernel of his thinking on literary creation. Praise for Soul Mountain: A brilliant sprawl of a novel that defies conventional notions of the self’ and literature.’”Washington Post Startlingly poetic language . . . Bewitching narrative voices . . .One long immersion in buried strata of history and the psyche.”Boston Globe Gao’s wanderer . . . has found survival . . . in words. And ultimately, it is the miracle of those words that wins Nobels.”Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Case for Literature

Yale University Press

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