2008-09-03 Compelling but flawed

A strange, disturbing book, One Man's Bible flits somewhat uneasily between the China of the Cultural Revolution and the protaganist's sexual encounters in the West, decades later.
Written by a self-confessed 'carnival performer with language', Gao Xingjian's latest work is at once a novel of freedom and repression, whether political or sexual, and a philosophical tome on the art of writing itself.
If the subject matter alone makes for a difficult read, the style in which it is written compounds the problem. While the author's self-division into the 'he' of his early life (the work is apparently semi-autobiographical) and the 'you' of his later years is relatively simple to grasp, less easy it the disjointed narrative. The first few chapters follow a fairly regular pattern, alternating between the author's life as a young man in China and his encounter with a German woman, who had been raped as a child and who is now able to act as his muse, enabling him to reminisce on his past. However, this Margarethe disappears from the scene relatively early on, and we are left with a stretch of the novel that deals mainly, although apparently not always chronologically, with life in Mao's China. And then suddenly we find ourselves in Sydney, where the author is taking a young French woman for a walk in a national park. More strange still is the chapter in which the author has an imagined conversation with the dead Mao.
Perhaps this disjunction is intended as metaphor for the cultural dislocation experienced by a writer exiled in the West struggling to explain an alien past to a Western audience. Somehow, however, the recounting of the author's sexual conquests are never really explained in the context of the rest of the book, and it is unclear as to exactly what kind of a work Gao Xingjian is trying to write.
One Man's Bible is certainly a compelling read, if only for its strangeness, but whether it is deserving of the Nobel Prize is another matter. Although one reviewer has compared Gao Xingjian to W.G. Sebald, I would suggest that Sebald, with his fluidity of prose and ability to capture the ghosts of the past, would have been a more suitable winner.