3 Review(s)

Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural revolution and the tentative liberties of the China of the 1990s, One Man’s Bible weaves memories of a Beijing boyhood and armorous encounters in Hong Kong with a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian’s life under the communist regime – where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. A fluid, elegant, evocative exploration of memory, One Man’s Bible pulses with an overwhelmingly powerful sense of the past, distant and near, and provides moving and unprecedented insights into the character of modern China. Gao Xingjian was born in 1940, in China. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote a number of works of prose, plays and poems, aware that what he wrote could not be published, since they failed to comply with the government's strict guidelines. He was finally able to publish a substantial number of works during the 1980s, but when a ban was imposed on the performance of his play Bus Stop in 1983, Gao finally fled Beijing and began the long journey of a political refugee which forms the basis of Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible. He now lives in Paris, where he writes and paints, and is a French citizen.