This collection of recent plays by Gao Xingjian is worth investigating by merit of the dramatist's receipt of the Nobel Prize and for the controversy raging around him and the Prize in China. Most readers will probably pick up this book for those very reasons. The plays contained are post-modern, avant-garde, and in some cases utterly abstract. They're the sort of scripts that probably make for very interesting plays when performed, but make for rather tedius reading. Some scripts make for very enjoyable literature, but Gao's are a little too "artsy" to work in print alone. I recommend "The Other Shore" for serious readers only: dramatists, academics, and the hardcore Chinese literature enthusiast. Casual readers, merely curious about this year's Nobel winner, should avoid this collection and instead read Gao's novel, "Soul Mountain", which is much more accessible.

Gao Xingjian's artistic sensibility was chiselled out of his double frustration of public condemnation and private shock.

After being established as a prominent Chinese playwright, he suddenly fell out of grace of the communist authorities, who dubbed his works as `Spiritual Pollution'. At that time he was also undergoing an intense personal trauma, being diagnosed, wrongly, with lung cancer. He set out on an extensive journey to the heart of China covering 5 months and 15,000 kilometres which helped him rediscover his self and his countrymen and helped change his world-view.

Although a direct outcome of this emotional journey was the phantasmogoric novel `Soul Mountain', the present five plays also bear testimony to his broadened horizon.

In his plays the mythical finds place with the real, as he tries to make sense of the diversity of his land's culture and its people. Gao tries to mask the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in a set of highly original imagery. The symbolism sometimes obfuscates the proceedings, but the stark realism of the human drama comes back again and again. Some of Gao's views, on man woman relationship for instance, may not be palatable to the Western sensibility, but one has to understand the vast compass that he is handling in these plays.

Out of the five plays `The Other Shore' and `Nocturnal Wanderer' are the most gripping. But all the five plays reflect the yearning of the individual to break lose from the stifling collective memory.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000 goes to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian

"for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama".

In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses. He is a perspicacious sceptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.

His great novel Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves. It is based on impressions from journeys in remote districts in southern and south-western China, where shamanistic customs still linger on, where ballads and tall stories about bandits are recounted as the truth and where it is possible to come across exponents of age-old Daoist wisdom. The book is a tapestry of narratives with several protagonists who reflect each other and may represent aspects of one and the same ego. With his unrestrained use of personal pronouns Gao creates lightning shifts of perspective and compels the reader to question all confidences. This approach derives from his dramas, which often require actors to assume a role and at the same time describe it from the outside. I, you and he/she become the names of fluctuating inner distances.

Soul Mountain is a novel of a pilgrimage made by the protagonist to himself and a journey along the reflective surface that divides fiction from life, imagination from memory. The discussion of the problem of knowledge increasingly takes the form of a rehearsal of freedom from goals and meaning. Through its polyphony, its blend of genres and the scrutiny that the act of writing subjects itself to, the book recalls German Romanticism's magnificent concept of a universal poetry.

Gao Xingjian's second novel, One Man's Bible, fulfils the themes of Soul Mountain but is easier to grasp. The core of the book involves settling the score with the terrifying insanity that is usually referred to as China's Cultural Revolution. With ruthless candour the author accounts for his experiences as a political activist, victim and outside observer, one after the other. His description could have resulted in the dissident's embodiment of morality but he rejects this stance and refuses to redeem anyone else. Gao Xingjian's writing is free of any kind of complaisance, even to good will. His play Fugitives irritated the democracy movement just as much as those in power.

Gao Xingjian points out himself the significance for his plays of the non-naturalistic trends in Western drama, naming Artaud, Brecht, Beckett and Kantor. However, it has been equally important for him to "open the flow of sources from popular drama". When he created a Chinese oral theatre, he adopted elements from ancient masked drama, shadow plays and the dancing, singing and drumming traditions. He has embraced the possibility of moving freely in time and space on the stage with the help of one single gesture or word - as in Chinese opera. The uninhibited mutations and grotesque symbolic language of dreams interrupt the distinct images of contemporary humanity. Erotic themes give his texts feverish excitement, and many of them have the choreography of seduction as their basic pattern. In this way he is one of the few male writers who gives the same weight to the truth of women as to his own.

The Swedish Academy

The Nobel Prize for Literature is given to a writer for the body of work they have produced. I have wondered in the past if the circumstances under which an author wrote, and or the danger their writing placed them in ever played a role in their recognition as well. "One Man's Bible", by Gao Xingjian was a very trying book to wade through. I received a copy early and it took me almost 2 months to finally make my way through the work. This became a book I would read between others as opposed to a work I enjoyed enough to read for what it had to offer. The book is written as though it was produced as it came to the writer's mind, not organized, rather just a chronicle of a variety of thoughts and experiences.

There are a few issues which may detract from the possibility of enjoying this work including, my lack of knowledge regarding the various rebellions, revolutions, and counter revolutions that this tale chronicles. I am also unsure how easily the original work in Chinese translates in to English. Much of the persecution the author describes is familiar to other repressive regimes that were based in Soviet Russia, or a variety of European Countries. But even though the wretched behavior of whatever group in power exerts over the weak is appalling, I have a harder time getting involved with the work. It is not a lack of empathy, but a lack of knowledge or perhaps a lack of understanding of Chinese history and culture.

This author has clearly had an impact on the literary world, and he may or may not have been recognized with The Nobel Prize if he lived in a nation that permitted freedom of expression. I don't have that answer, and that is why I do not rate the book as a poor one.

The part I really did enjoy was a chapter when the author wrote about writing and why people in general and he in particular write. While this was interesting it was confined to a single chapter, and this was not enough to keep me interested for any great length of time.

I highly recommend this book. Initially I found it difficult and the sequences with Margarethe were perhaps a little bit tiresome but warming up to the story I got a lot out of it. I don't agree that the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were just like the purges and fascist regimes in other parts of the world. Instead of simple oppression by evil regimes against suffering citizens there was instead millions of little civil wars in every commune, every factory, every office across the country.

The style is a little detached at times but this adds to the atmosphere. The writer doesn't try to create victim-heroes but shows what it was like for the compromised majority. A world dominated by fear and compromise, favours furtively delivered and favours frantically called in. Beatings, up-rooting and death are common in a situation where one is not allowed to be neutral, one must take sides to survive. It was corrosive to all human relationships and leaving a generation traumatised. One can only wonder what it really meant to experience it, or what it would be like if social purists or Christian Reconstructionists came to power in ones own country.

The description is thorough and uncompromising; the experience of being caught up in the events well communicated but it is neither a confession nor an accusation. It is ultimately the tale of ordinary fearful people put in terrifying circumstances where every thing you ever did or said could betray you. At the end there is a sort of acceptance and personal reconciliation.

Read it, its good.

Soul Mountain is a book of travels. it is recollections of author's 15,000 k.m. journey to the remote mountains and villages of unknown China. IT was both an escape from political oppression and seach for the meaning of self. The author seeks to reveal the hidden china and its people. It is a world of magic and secrets. He saw women who knew magic and were experts in seduction. He recorded their songs, prayers and call for spirits. IT IS CHINA WHICH YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN.

This is not a novel with a definite plot. The traveller goes to reach the soul mountain. There are I, SHE, YOU, HE only, no names. no characters. The world is a stage and everybody is a character. His prose is beautiful and captivating. Very Moving ,indeed. but you may be perplexed by its mix of real places with fiction. Author's articulations about the role of art and artist are real provocation to the Communist establishment in China. it is a declaration of artist's freedom in a totalitarian society. He asserts the cultural diversity of chinese people also.

Soul Mountain is hands down one of the best books I have ever read. Epic in scope, not unlike the Fictional Lord of the Rings series that seems to take you to all corners of a land, yet personal in it's telling, in Soul Mountain, a book about one man's journey throughout China after rediscovering the gift of life after being misdiagnosed with terminal cancer (based on, but not entirely, a true story),you feel like you are really on a journey, and dont want it to end. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about traveling, epic adventures, or Asia. Since reading this book I have bought Gao's other writing, and while I have not yet begun to read the plays (the just released "One Mans Bible" has not yet reached me by mail) I am sure it will be an exceptional as this piece. Soul Maountain is truly a journey, epic, and beautiful, and not to be missed by readers who enjoyed such books as those written by Thoreaux, Iyer, Hansen, Childress, and Krakauer just to name a few (excuse me if I butchered their names, I dont have their books, also fine literature, by me). I truly cannot recommend this fantastic book highly enough.

I must admit that, when the Nobel prize was anounced last year , that I had never heard of the author Gao Xingjian, a feeling I shared most probably with 95% of the rest of the world. My first reaction was: how nice that the price has gone to China, but couldn't they have chosen one of the more well known writers?

I think it was the Washington Post Review which defended the choice by saying, amongst other things, that the Nobel committe has chosen unknown writers before and they quoted Mahfouz, my absolute favorite writer and Saramango as examples. Therefore I decide to read Snow Mountain.

Not to my regret! Soul Mountain is an epic voyage through China, through the inner self of the writer through philosophy, through I don't know what.

You can read the book on several levels. His observations on China are wonderful and anybody who has traveled in that great country will recognize something about the strangeness and mystique that lure around every corner whilst at the same time also recognizing many of the very down to earth tableaus of the daily struggle for life.

Quite often I had the feeling of being taken back into Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance or Thomas Mann's the Magic Mountain; here you are reading about a very ordinary situation and all of a sudden you are taken into a major philosophical treatise.

The struggle of the writer with his inner self are dripping from every page. This perhaps, more than anything else, defines the strength of this book. It is a soul-searching effort which fortunately most people are not capable of. It would certainly not benefit my mental health to do the same. It felt gratified when it appeared at the end that the writer seemed to have found a workable peace in himself.

Gao writes sometimes tenderly, sometimes coolly analyzing, sometimes rebuffing and that all magnifies the power of this book; it seems that in all instances, without having control over them, he is capable of describing his feelings.

It is not an easy book to read. It does not have a plot and writing about feelings ensures a lack of coherence. However, he seems at all stages very much in command of what he is doing.

I am sure I have to read it a second, and even a third time to be able to grasp everything Gao wants to communicate and I will.

I will not comment on whether this book is worth a Nobel Prize but I know that, once again, the Nobel Committee has given us a writer of utmost quality which otherwise I would not have found.