Author: Gao Xingjian
Translator(s): Mabel Lee
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 450
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8172235186
Description
A new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of the international bestseller Soul Mountain. A fluid, elegant, evocative exploration of memory, this novel pulses with an overwhelmingly powerful sense of the past, distant and near, and provides moving and unprecedented insights into the character of modern China.
Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the tentative, limited liberties of the China of the 1990s, this novel 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, evocative exploration of memory, this novel pulses with an overwhelmingly powerful sense of the past, distant and near, and provides moving and unprecedented insights into the character of modern China.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
When he writes of his experiences in the real world, Gao transcends cultural barriers. A good story will stand out in any language, and when Gao is good he is staggeringly so. His writings about the Cultural Revolution is remarkable
= Daily Telegraph
Gao's work belongs to that curious genre of intellectual quest dominated by the great WG Sebald, presenting the reader with a wonderfully broad portrait of a country caught between the ancient and the modern in a most fundamental way.
= Irish Times