About the Author

Gao Xingjian was born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, and has lived in France since 1987. Gao is considered an artistic innovator in his native China, both in the visual arts and in literature. He is that rare multi-talented artist who excels as a novelist, playwright, essayist, director and painter. Two novels, the internationally best-selling Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, are available in English from Flamingo, as well as a volume of his art entitled Return to Painting.

Reviews

Praise for Gao Xingjian: 'When he writes of his experiences in the real world, Gao transcends cultural barriers. A good story will out in any language, and when Gao is good he is staggeringly so.' Daily Telegraph 'Brilliant and poetic, keen and original… Gao's ambition is to transcend the specifics of time and place, to write a meditation on literature itself and its ability to reveal the raging, brutal, brilliant beast that is mankind itself… [His work] burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling… Unforgettable.' New York Times

Praise for Gao Xingjian:

'When he writes of his experiences in the real world, Gao transcends cultural barriers. A good story will out in any language, and when Gao is good he is staggeringly so.' Daily Telegraph

'Brilliant and poetic, keen and original... Gao's ambition is to transcend the specifics of time and place, to write a meditation on literature itself and its ability to reveal the raging, brutal, brilliant beast that is mankind itself... [His work] burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling... Unforgettable.' New York Times

Six stories, published in Chinese between 1983 and 1991, offer a sample of Nobel-winner Gao's sharp, poetic early work. In "The Temple," the unnamed narrator and his new bride alter their honeymoon plans to pause in a provincial town. Though the two are blissfully happy, they find the town's inhabitants and its Temple of Perfect Benevolence vaguely disquieting. A muted reference to the Cultural Revolution ("It all felt so different from the time when we were graduates sent to work in the countryside") may explain the unease. Gao (Soul Mountain; One Man's Bible) explores the simultaneous enormity and anonymity of death in "The Accident," when a man on a bicycle with an attached baby buggy rides, either carelessly or deliberately, into a bus. The man is killed, but his young son survives; a crowd forms, passing around rumors, while the cops take away the bus driver and the blood on the road congeals. The title story employs collages of memory and haunting daydreams to mourn the destruction of the narrator's grandfather's village. A "sparkling lake" has been paved over, and the river where the narrator and his grandfather used to fish is dry: "The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything. It has swallowed the riverbank and now wants to swallow the city along with your childhood memories and mine." Gao intends his stories to reveal "the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality"-storytelling, in other words, is not his goal. These spare, evocative pieces bear that out; often the lovely prose (nicely translated by Lee) is reward enough. (Feb. 6) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.