The Review of Contemporary Fiction

One Man’s Bible, by Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee
reviewed by Jason Picone

Gao Xingjian. One Man’s Bible. Trans. Mabel Lee. HarperCollins, 2002. 464 pp. $26.95.

Gao Xingjian’s newly translated novel is a fictionalization of his life during China’s political upheaval in the 1960s and seventies. Readers with little or no knowledge of the Cultural Revolution will find One Man’s Bible bewildering and possibly nonsensical, as Gao never offers any historical background. The absence of any explanation for the warring Mao factions, the public disavowal of loving parents by their children, and the mindless bloodshed that all defined the era hint that the author finds it incomprehensible himself. Through his fictionalized experience, Gao seeks to transform the futility and massive human waste of Mao’s hyperpolitical nightmare into a personal manifesto for living well—the bible of the novel’s title. Gao’s nameless narrator moves from a first-person voice to a second- and a third-, and these narrative variations are inconsistent and unpredictable. This narrative blending conveys the schizophrenia of the Cultural Revolution, during which the narrator had to articulate beliefs that were not his own in order to survive, all the while preserving his own thoughts and moral integrity deep in his mind. This practice led to an intense personal philosophy wherein the narrator became his own God and disciple, a defiant solution to the political turmoil that threatened to physically and mentally squash him. Oddly enough, the novel’s premise is that the narrator is relating his experience of the Cultural Revolution to his lover in near present-day Hong Kong in between lovemaking sessions. Even though Gao’s intense eroticism makes a strange bedfellow for the revelations concerning China’s bitter past, this unique pairing gives the book a tenderness and desperation it might otherwise lack. Gao’s ability to detach himself from the political fervor of the Cultural Revolution enabled him to endure and later give his country its first Nobel Prize winner in letters.