‘A rich soup of a book… One man’s personal and philosophical odyssey evolves against the dramatic and vibrantly physical background of Central China’s ancient forests.
‘Gao’s flight to rural China to evade imprisonment inspired this dazzling autobiographical novel… Superficially, this epic picaresque resembles familiar western literary forms but its bedrock is utterly other.’ This search for self serves to set the book beyond cultures while also succeeding in presenting the Western reader with a wonderfully broad portrait of a country caught between the ancient and the modern in a most fundamental way.’ Part novel, part philosophical tract, the genius of Soul Mountain lies in its not attempting to offer any answers… It instead belongs to that curious genre of intellectual quest dominated by the great German writer WG Sebald. Gao Xingjian was born on 4 January 1940 in war-torn China soon after the beginning of the Japanese invasion. He completed secondary and tertiary studies in the People’s Republic of China (established in 1949 after the Communist victory in the civil war against the Nationalists), graduating with a major in French from the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute in 1962.
Gao Xingjian came to national and international prominence as a writer and critic during the early 1980s for his experimental works of drama, fiction and theory that contravened the guidelines established by the ideologues of the Chinese Communist Party. At the time, China was just beginning to emerge from the throes of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a decade during which the self of the individual was virtually annihilated from intellectual and creative activities.
0 kommentar(er)
