Gao Xingjian – författare

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2000. Part travel diary, part philosophy, part love story, ‘Soul Mountain’ is an elegant, unforgettable novel that journeys deep into the heart of modern-day China.In 1982 Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer, the very disease that had killed his father. For six weeks Gao inhabited a transcendental state of imminent death, treating himself to the finest foods he could afford while spending time reading in an old graveyard in the Beijing suburbs. But a secondary examination revealed there was no cancer – he had won a ‘reprieve from death’ and had been thrown back into the world of the living.Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing. He travelled first to the ancient forests of central China and from there to the east coast, passing through eight provinces and seven nature reserves, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometres over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is ‘Soul Mountain’.Interwoven into this picaresque journey are myriad stories and countless memorable characters – from venerable Daoist masters and Buddhist monks and nuns to mythical Wild Men; deadly Qichun snakes to farting buses. Conventions are challenged, preconceptions are thwarted and the human condition, with all its foibles and triumphs, is laid bare.

The new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of international bestseller ‘Soul Mountain’. ‘Unforgettable. “One Man’s Bible” burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling.’ New York TimesMoving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the tentative, limited liberties of the China of the 1990s, ‘One Man’s Bible’ weaves memories of a Beijing boyhood and amorous 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 exploration of memory, This novel is a profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit – and on how that spirit can triumph.

From China's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature comes an exquisite new book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English.A young couple on honeymoon visit a beautiful temple up in the mountains, and spend the day intoxicated by the tranquillity of the setting; a swimmer is paralysed by a sudden cramp and finds himself stranded far out to sea on a cold autumn day; a man reminisces about his beloved grandfather, who used to make his own fishing rods from lengths of crooked bamboo straightened over a fire…Blending the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, these stories hum with simplicity and wisdom – and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.

Gao Xingjian is the leading Chinese dramatist of our time. He is also one of the most moving and literary writers for the contemporary stage. His plays have been performed all around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. Born and educated in China, Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962. After the Cultural Revolution, he became a resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His works, including Bus Stop, Absolute Signal, and Wilderness Man, were trend-setting and have created many controversies and a wave of experimental drama in China. In 1987 he settled in Paris, France and continued to write in Chinese and in French. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992. The present collection contains five of Gao Xingjian's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). One finds poetry, comedy as well as tragedy in the plays, which are graced by beautiful language and original imagery. Combining Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, they serve to illuminate the gritty realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile, all essential concerns in Gao's understanding of the existence of modern man. The plays are also manifestations of the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance.

"Of Mountains and Seas" is one of the most spirited and fun-filled plays written by Gao Xingjian. Based on the ancient text "The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing)", the play re-enacts the classical world of Chinese mythology, traversing the creation of humans to the beginning of Chinese dynastic history. It is a world of magical powers and child-like wonderment, peopled with gods, ghosts, ghouls, and monsters.In employing song and dance, acrobatics and other Chinese folk art forms, the play carries on Gao Xingjian's search for a 'omnipotent theater' and a new form of modern Eastern drama. "Of Mountains and Seas" is also an attempt to construct a grand narrative of Chinese mythology, wrestling it back from the contaminations of ideology, politics and didacticism so as to restore its authenticity. With this innocence and purity of origin, Gao insists, the play offers a glimpse of the collective consciousness of the Chinese race and human nature in general.

City of the Dead and Ballade Nocturne are two plays by Gao Xingjian, the Nobel laureate, which create new modes of theatrical presentation by experimenting with prose and poetry. In the City of the Dead, Gao employs traditional Chinese opera techniques that combine singing with dialogue, movement, and martial arts into a modern play. Ballade Nocturne, conceived as a poem play with dance, uses one female actor and two female dancers to represent the subjective self of the contemporary woman, divided in the “I” and the “she”. These two plays advance Gao's theatrical experiments in dramatic prose across linguistic and cultural boundaries.