Gao, Xingjian "Soul Mountain"

(Chinese Title: 灵山, língshān) - 1989

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

An extraordinary book. A biography, a search for someone's soul in a world where the individual means nothing. A collection of stories from the now to the past, jumping to and fro but after a while, you get the hang of it. An introduction to the characters that are "I" and "you", "he", and "she" but they all seem to intermingle. A story about a traveler who discovers his own country and thereby discovers himself. And on the side, he introduces the reader to a lot of Chinese culture, religion, politics and history as well as his own story, the story of his father, his ancestors.

I also liked his insight into many problems that are out of his way, you would think he has other problems of his own to think about but, no, he comes up with quotes like "...when people assault nature [sic] nature inevitably takes revenge." or "... nature is not frightening, it's people who are frightening!"

One of my favourite passages: "I am perpetually searching for meaning, but what in fact is meaning? Can I stop people from constructing this big dam as an epitaph for the annihilation of their selves? I can only search for the self of the I who is small and insignificant like a grain of sand. I may as well write a book on the human self without worrying whether it will be published. But then of what consequence is it whether one book more, or one book less, is written? Hasn't enough culture been destroyed? Does humankind need so much culture? And moreover, what is culture?"

And then, as an Esperanto speaker myself, I love it when I find my language in a book: "He had a deep voice and could sing L'Internationale in Esperanto."

This is certainly not an easy read, something you read on the side to hear a "nice story". The author challenges you to try to understand his ways, his culture's ways. And by accompanying him on his search for Soul Mountain at the source of the You River, you can find a lot about yourself, as well.

From the back cover:

" 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 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 Mountain 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."

Xingjian Gao received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama".


Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

One Man's Bible by Gao Xingjian

Originally reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

on Edith's Miscellany

However much we’d like to start life all over again with a clean slate after a traumatising experience, it’s virtually impossible. If we like it or not, any such experience has a lasting impact on our world view and on our behaviour as well. It marks and even forms us. Cases of dementia and brain injury excluded, we can only refuse to allow memories to come back to our conscious minds. Nonetheless, they keep working on us under the surface. And more often than not, these disagreeable ghosts of the past return sooner or later to haunt us. Ten years after his flight, the exiled playwright in One Man’s Bible by Gao Xinjian, the Sino-French recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2000, finds himself forced to relive the trauma of almost fifty years under Communist reign that he tried to forget when his Jewish-German sex partner starts asking questions.

Gao Xingjian (高行健) was born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, China, in January 1940. In Beijing, he studied French at university and then worked at the Chinese International Bookstore until the 1970s. During the Cultural Revolution, he became farm labourer and burnt his writings to destroy all physical evidence for his dissident ideas. Back in Beijing, he worked for a magazine, for the Chinese Association of Writers and eventually for the Beijing People’s Art Theatre where he made his name as absurdist dramatist with plays like 車站 (1983; tr. Bus Stop) and The Other Shore (彼岸: 1986). In the late 1980s, the author left China and settled in France becoming a French citizen in 1998. Although he kept writing and directing plays, his prose works – the short-story collection Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (給我老爺買魚竿: 1986-1990) and the novels Soul Mountain (靈山: 1989) and One Man’s Bible (一個人的聖經: 1998) – made him known internationally. In 2000, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature “for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.” Gao Xingjian lives in Bagnolet, France.
The protagonist of One Man’s Bible is a middle-aged writer from China who has been living in Western exile already for years and who tries to exist only in the instant avoiding all thoughts of a past that sometimes still haunts him in nightmares. Nonetheless, his story opens with the memory of a yellowed photo showing himself as a little boy among his bourgeois family. Like most of his personal possessions that could have linked him to his Chinese past it was lost him, probably confiscated by the police after he failed to return to Beijing from a stay abroad.

“For him, life before he was ten was like a dream. His childhood always seemed to be a dream world, even when his family was on the run as refugees. The truck was careering along a muddy mountain road in the rain and, all day long, he held a basket of oranges, which he ate under the tarpaulin covering. He once asked his mother if this had happened, and she said at the time oranges were cheap, and if you gave the villagers some money, they loaded them onto the truck next to the people. […]”

The reencounter with the Jewish-German translator Margarethe, whom he knows from student days in Beijing and meets again by chance in the late 1990s while in Hong Kong for the performance of one of his plays, leads not just to several nights of non-committal sex, but also to many questions about his past that break open the flood gates to his memory. Long repressed recollections come drifting to the surface. He realises that at last he’ll have to face the ghosts of his Chinese past and decides to write down everything in the purest form of narration within his capacity.

“His experiences have silted up in the creases of your memory. How can they be stripped off in layers, coherently arranged and scanned, so that a pair of detached eyes can observe what he had experienced? You are you and he is he. It is difficult for you to return to how it was in his mind in those times, he has already become so unfamiliar. Don’t repaint him with your present arrogance and complacency, but ensure that you maintain a distance that will allow for sober observation and examination. […]”

However, the years under the omnipresent eyes of Mao Zedong and his Party don’t come back to his mind in their chronological order. Driven by momentary associations, he goes back and forth in his life and in the bloodstained history of China after 1949 with its repeated anti-rightist campaigns culminating in the Cultural Revolution that made him volunteer in time for work on a reform-through-labour farm and burn all his writings for fear of their being discovered. He couldn’t trust anybody, not even his sexual partners, but sleeping with them allowed him at least a short instant of complete freedom…

Despite a narrating voice that alternates between a detaching present “you” and an estranged past “he”, One Man’s Bible is the only thinly disguised memoir of the exiled author himself or rather of his novelised alter ego at odds with his Chinese origins. There’s no worthwhile plot driving the story, just a loose frame of present-day scenes around disconnected flashbacks in which the author never shows any emotional response to events witnessed, suffered or caused – unless having sex with any young woman at hand to feel free and alive counts as one. Consequently, the general tone of the account is matter-of-fact throughout. The carefully chosen key events that the author recounts in great, often shocking detail, however, are enough to make palpable the oppressive atmosphere, the constant fear and mistrust in Communist China and they let his unacknowledged pain and bitterness transpire in and between every line. Even in the freedom of exile he can’t find meaning and just drifts living in the moment. Apart from himself, all people who cross his path remain bland and lifeless as if they were to him no more than supernumeraries in a play. The novel’s unpretentious language makes it nevertheless a pleasurable read.

It’s certainly true that One Man’s Bible by en-NOBEL-ed Gao Xingjian isn’t exactly light entertainment offering a welcome escape from dire reality for a while, but this isn’t what I’m primarily looking for in literature, anyway. Unfortunately, the novelised memoir isn’t a particularly deep, enlightening or otherwise impressive read, either, and so I can’t say that I thoroughly liked it… or the author himself as the person that his lines conjure. My impression of him is overall less than flattering, to be honest, and there’s nothing about him that would make me wish to meet him ever. Thus, virtually the only reason why I appreciated the book almost as much as Frog by Mo Yan (»»» read my review), another – later – recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature from China, is that it acquainted me further with recent Chinese history. For the same reason I decided to recommend it here.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
https://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2019/12/one-mans-bible-by-gao-xingjian.html

One Man's Bible by Gao Xingjian

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 [book:Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall|226369], 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!!

I read and journalled this book on September 9th 2003.
Cross-posted at GoodReads

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

Volatile and fleeting - those are the two words that I feel best portray my impressions of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain. Upon completing a book, my opinions will usually clot together and solidify somewhat, but here, they evaporated away. All I was left with was a wispy impression, and that’s why it took me such a long time to gather my thoughts.

At a superficial level, Soul Mountain is the story of one man’s journey across the Chinese countryside. The narrator travels through mountains and desolate villages, gathering folk songs and attempting to rediscover a lost childhood. Beneath this, however, there lies a tangled mess of thought. Something of deeper meaning. A few days ago, I wrote that I was floating outside of Gao’s vision, unable to understand. He himself explores this in his writing:

…the village settlement with the wooden houses which have gone black, the savage Alsatian with the grey-black fur, and the crazy woman with the snake on the carrying pole. These all seem to be hinting at something, just like the huge gloomy mountain behind the small building. There is something more to it all which I will never be able to fully understand.

It is soon evident that far from being a physical journey, Gao is redrawing the spiritual and emotional map of China, alongside the physical. With Soul Mountain, especially, an understanding of contextual background is significant. This novel was birthed during the tumultuous after-effects of the Cultural Revolution - it was formed from the void of religion, morals, and culture in Communist China. Uncertainty and the need to rediscover the self was poured into - and has been contained within - Gao’s novel.

I am perpetually searching for meaning, but what in fact is meaning? … I can only search for the self of the I who is small and insignificant like a grain of sand. I may as well write a book on the hman self without worrying whether it will be published. But then of what consequence is it whether one book more, or one book less, is written? Hasn’t enough culture been destroyed? Does humankind need so much culture? And moreover, what is culture?

The rest of this review can be found over at tuesday in silhouette.

Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather by Gao Xingjian

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather is a short story collection by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. It's a short book, only 125 pages, and I read it to fulfill my books in translation requirement in the Reading across Borders Challenge, my "X" author [yes, I know the Chinese last name, first name deal, but it is filed under 'X' in bookstores], and as a book that meets the requirement for the Book Awards Challenge.

There are only 6 stories in this collection, and they were picked by Gao himself to represent his writing in an English translation. In the translator's notes, she indicated that Gao "warns readers that his fiction does not set out to tell a story. There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself."

Of the six stories, I found the last two, "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather" and "In an Instant" to be the most interesting. The first involves memories of childhood and the feeling that you 'can't go home again'. Here is a quote from that story:

Even so, I want to buy him a fishing rod. It's hard to explain, and I'm not going to try. It's simply something that I want to do. For me the fishing rod is my grandfather and my grandfather is the fishing rod.

The last story, "In an Instant," sort of feels like a psychedelic trip. I wasn't sure exactly what was going on in the story, but it sure was interesting. Here is one of those 'interesting' paragraphs:

He is sitting at the computer with a cigarette in his mouth. A long sentence appears on the screen. "What" is not to understand "what" is to understand or not is not to understand that even when "what" is understood, it is not understood, for "what" is to understand and "what" is not to understand, "what" is "what" and "is not" is "is not," and so is not to understand not wanting to understand or simply not understanding why "what" needs to be understood or whether "what" can be understood, and also it is not understood whether "what" is really not understood or that it simply hasn't been rendered so that it can be understood or is really understood but that there is a pretense not to understand or a refusal to try to understand or is pretending to want to understand yet deliberately not understanding or actually trying unsuccessfully to understand, then so what if it's not understood and if it's not understood, then why go to all this trouble of wanting to understand it--

Hmm, you tell me!

2004, 125 pp.
Rating: 4