Soul Mountain - Brossura

Gao Xingjian

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0007119224 ISBN 13: 9780007119226

Casa editrice: Flamingo, 2001

Riassunto

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2000. Part travel diary, part philosophy, part love story, Soul Mountain is an elegant, unforgettable novel which 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 which 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 Moutain.

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.

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Recensione:

'Gao has helped illuminate the human condition for people throughout the world in ways that bring credit to him and to literary endeavour.' THES

'There is a sense throughout that Gao is running after things that are already vanishing. On the nature reserves, people are shooting bears and even pandas; trees are being cut down a hundred times faster than before. Stones inscribed with historical inscriptions have been dynamited to yield materials for bridges that were never built... Soul Mountain is Gao's attempt to bring back what is lost. In the end, his gift is to look beyond politics at the human condition, offering no easy explanations and refusing artificial allegiances.' Sunday Times

‘Gao transcends cultural barriers. A good story will out in any language, and when Gao is good he is staggeringly so. His writing about the Cultural Revolution is remarkable.' Daily Telegraph

'A picaresque novel on an epic scale... Soul Mountain bristles with narratives in miniature – stories from ancient Chinese history, folk tales, childhood reminiscences, memories of the Cultural Revolution, as well as bitter arguments and passionate sex. Gao's aim is to represent "the ineffability of life", and, as far as that is possible to do, he has done it in this complex, rich and strange novel.' Independent on Sunday

L'autore:

Gao Xingjian was born on 4 January 1940, in war-torn China. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote a number of works of prose, plays and poems, aware that what he wrote could not be published, since they failed to comply with the government's strict guidelines. He was finally able to publish a substantial number of works during the 1980s, but when a ban was imposed on the performance of his play Bus Stop in 1983, Gao Xingjian finally fled Beijing and began the long journey as a political refugee which forms the autobiographical basis of Soul Mountain. He now lives in Paris, where he continues to write and paint, and is a French citizen.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Flamingo
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0007119224
• ISBN 13: 9780007119226
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 528