One Man's Bible: A Novel

Gao Xingjian

Mar 2009 · Harper Collins

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“Courageous … One Man’s Bible is driven by the sweeping panorama of history and the suffering and reconciliation that underlie it.”— Washington Post Book World

Published to impressive critical acclaim, One Man's Bible enhances the reputation of Nobel Prize-winning Gao Xingjian, whose first novel, Soul Mountain, was a national bestseller.

One Man’s Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian’s life under the oppressive totalitarian regime of Mao Tse-tung during the period of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Whether in the “beehive” offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life everywhere is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, 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 how the human spirit can triumph.

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Gao Xingjian (whose name is pronounced gow shing-jen) is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he has lived in France since 1987. Gao Xingjian is an artistic innovator, in both the visual arts and literature. He is that rare multitalented artist who excels as novelist, playwright, essayist, director, and painter. In addition to Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, a book of his plays, The Other Shore, and a volume of his paintings, Return to Painting, have been published in the United States.