One Man's Bible

Rating:
Summary: A Touch of Humanity to the Humanities...
Review: "One Man's Bible" has done what few books manage to do...take classical philosophy and add a deep human touch to it. The story follows Gao from his early childhood, through numerous government positions, lovers, and nations. The reader gains great insights into otherwise overlooked (and even condemned) aspects of life...from photography to simple writings and even to promiscuous sex. However, what impressed me more than the storyline was Gao's unique language and narrative. It is like a beautiful poem, written in simple prose. Also, he uses a narrative that I have never seen before, he jumps from a first-person narrative to a personal narrative, using "you" and putting the reader's soul into his body, making the reader and the author one. Exotic, beautiful, poetic, and deeply philosophical, I recommend it to any reader over 16 who is not offended by graphic sex and occasional foul language.

Rating:
Summary: one man's focus
Review: "One Man's Bible" is the first of Gao Xingjian's two novels that I have read. I had anticipated an in-depth, inside look at life in Communist China. I got that but not in the manner I had come to expect. Xingjian portrays a society that was certainly a repressive one but yet one in which evolving standards enabled the hero to be both victim and active participant. The book weaves itself around in time so that, for the first two thirds of the book, the chapters go back and forth between past and present. This has the effect of letting us know that the hero survives whatever crisis he faces as we go along. While this minimizes some otherwise suspenseful moments, it also enhances our interest in other subjects. For example, we learn very early in the book about the hero's failed marriage but we never find out anything more about the particulars until the last third of the book.

This book certainly appears to be autobiographical fiction and we see our hero, Xingjian, develop as an artist and find his own personal freedom in his art. Yet he often has to hide or destroy the very things that give meaning to his life lest he seem "different" from the standard. We follow the development of Red China through to the near present when relaxed repression alows persons like Xingjian to emmigrate.

The person that Xingjian has become is not a very likeable one. He is focussed solely on himself. His relationships with women, and there are many of these, seem to center almost exclusively on sex. His marriage that failed was apparently not his fault but he seemed determined never to commit himself to anyone else after that. I found myself engrossed in his story but not in himself. As I reflected on this, I came to the understanding that Xingjian had a lifetime struggle to avoid becoming just another one of the masses. In struggling to maintain his individuality he seems to have succeeded too well. Perhaps this is the greatest statement he was able to make about the evils of a communist society.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious
Review: and boring. The characters are one dimensional and the language is flat (maybe the translation loses something). I've only finished half the book and someday, if I ever run out of things to read, I may pick it up and finish it.

Rating:
Summary: At least, a Chinese Mark Twain
Review: Gao's penetrating and honest insights about Chinese people, the Cultural Revolution, and his personal experience and feeling enable him to create a book that is as realistic and beautiful as books created by Mark Twain. It is a great achievement!

Rating:
Summary: Engaging with food for reflection
Review: I highly recommend this book. Initially I found it difficult and the sequences with Margarethe were perhaps a little bit tiresome but warming up to the story I got a lot out of it. I don't agree that the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were just like the purges and fascist regimes in other parts of the world. Instead of simple oppression by evil regimes against suffering citizens there was instead millions of little civil wars in every commune, every factory, every office across the country.

The style is a little detached at times but this adds to the atmosphere. The writer doesn't try to create victim-heroes but shows what it was like for the compromised majority. A world dominated by fear and compromise, favours furtively delivered and favours frantically called in. Beatings, up-rooting and death are common in a situation where one is not allowed to be neutral, one must take sides to survive. It was corrosive to all human relationships and leaving a generation traumatised. One can only wonder what it really meant to experience it, or what it would be like if social purists or Christian Reconstructionists came to power in ones own country.

The description is thorough and uncompromising; the experience of being caught up in the events well communicated but it is neither a confession nor an accusation. It is ultimately the tale of ordinary fearful people put in terrifying circumstances where every thing you ever did or said could betray you. At the end there is a sort of acceptance and personal reconciliation.

Read it, its good.

Rating:
Summary: A bit tedious at first, but it gets better. A great novel!
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Vanitiy Piece
Review: I read and loved "Soul Mountain." I've lived five years in China myself, and I found the work extrememly moving and meaningful. It's maybe my favorite book. It defies description.

This book, "One Man's Bible," however, does not defy description. It is a vanity piece by someone who wrote the book that won the Nobel Prize for literature. Like, it seems, many others, it took me quite a while to get through it.

Interesting in places, but that's the best it does.

Rating:
Summary: A detached voice that articulates the dark period of China
Review: One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the excruciating effects of sordid political oppression on human spirit. The sobriety of writing bespeaks a dignity, which is an awareness of existence, and it is in this existence that the power of the frail individual lies. In a laudably detached voice, Gao Xinjian stipples a vivid picture of human frailty, repression and suffering under the totalitarian regime that exists only in memory, like a hidden spring of spring gushing forth a deluge of feelings that are difficult to articulate.

The book, unlike many of the contemporaries that expose austerity of life under Red Horror, is shockingly realistic and yet not a tale of suffering, at least that is not what Gao intends it to be. The delineation is so genuine and faithful to the reckless truth and excruciatingly painful purging that only men in Gao's generation can identify with. The reality is almost too heartrending to bear, even in words: the acrimonious politics, the class struggles, and a society that is riddled with paranoia and fear under such taut repression and miasma.

Gao reflected on his childhood and adolescence, cudgeled his memory of China's most obstreperous times, and yet found an incredulously detached voice as if he is an outsider to all the horror. His narrative in the book is almost a form of joy without any connotations of morality. He is indeed like an outsider who narrates transparently the events, who scrapes off the thick residue of resentment and anger deep in his heart and articulates his thoughts and impression with amazing equanimity, and audacity.

The result is a brand new voice in modern Chinese literature, a genre that deviates from post-modernism. It is a pure form of narration in which he contrives to describe in simple language the terrible contamination of life by politics, the tragic infringement of human rights, and at the same time manages to expunge the pervasive politics that penetrates every pore and sense. One can realize that Gao has carefully excised the insights that he possesses at the instant and in the place, as well as shoving aside his present thoughts.

The meaning of the title is at total loggerhead to any preoccupied speculation that readers might possess prior to reading the book. Gao contrives not to write about politics though he means to accent his memories during the dark period. The outcome is a stunning account of man person's fate is being miraculously and calumnously determined with surpassing accuracy than the prophecies of the bible, attributing to the policies and regulations that fluctuate so frequently, according to the bitter contention of Party members.

As accurate as it claims to be, the dossier, which exists for each individual, is generally inaccessible to the general public, does not necessarily reflect the truth (including mentality, thoughts, political stance, and affiliations) of individuals. People learn to wear a mask, to extinguish their voices, to hide their true feelings deep at the bottom of their heart in the midst of paranoia. Everyone seizes the opportunity to put on an act to score some good points for himself. Nobody dares to look one another in the eyes for fear of betraying any allegedly reactionary or counter-revolutionary thoughts.

The sense of time is warped as Margarethe, Gao Xinjian's Jewish lover, stirs up his memories of the embittered childhood under the shadow of Mao in a hotel room during pre-handover Hong Kong. Though a fictionalized account, Gao has engaged in a dialogue that produces a state of mind that allows him to endure the pain of articulating the painful events. To him the country doesn't exist but exists only in memory that the country is possessed by him alone, and is thus a one man's account. The book is an epistle of freedom that is obtainable only through seizing the moments in life and capturing instant-to-instant transformations.

2004 (11) © MY

Rating:
Summary: Strong and Compelling
Review: One Man's Bible is not easy to read, as it is complicated both in form and content. An autobiogaphic novel of a chinese writer during Mao's Cultural Revolution....

The book deals with the thoughts, happenings and loneliness of one man, who struggles to find himself in the middle of political and culural turmoil in China.

Nothing is good or bad, everything is simply different shades of gray. What's acceptable one day is punishable the next. Nobody wants (dares) to take any type of political stance, in a changing world.

Anxiety and vulnerability are in every single paragraph, as the writer is obcessed with finding the meaning of life in casual sexual experiences.

Everyone is forced to wear a mask, which allow them to blend in to the everchanging panorama of things. Identity is nonexistent.

Regaring form, the book jumps not only from time to time, back and forth, but is also narrated in second and third person, which complicates things a bit.

As Gao clarifies during his Nobel acceptance speech, he wites for himself, and by doing so, provides an insight into twentieth century maoist China.

In summary, a bit heavy....

Rating:
Summary: It's really not a novel....
Review: Rarely I read a book that touches my soul so deeply as "One Man's Bible" did. It's a hard book to read and understand unless one lived through the Cultural Revolution in China or other equally bizarre times in history (as a Jew in WWII Nazi Germany?). When I started reading this book, it immediately became clear to me that Gao did not write it for an audience but really for himself. Stories you read in this book were commonplace during the Cultural Revolution, yet this book has led me to re-live through the Cultural Revolution with a new perspective that I did not yet have (I was only 10 years old when the Cultural Revolution started). A very different book from other novels written by more popular contemporary Chinese authors (i.e. Ha Jin and Jung Chang). Those other books are more story-telling, but try to read "One Man's Bible" as out-pouring of a twisted soul that desperately wants to go back to its innocent past, albeit knowing the past was forever gone. I can only think of another book that has a similar feel (and depth) to it: "The Magic Whip" by Wang Ping, a collection of work by a Chinese woman poet. It was a feast to me too.