Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, 1999

A long and completely detached autobiographical but fictionalised retrospective on Gao’s time as a revolutionary Party cadré under China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, and a navel-gazing analysis of how women and sex have shaped him throughout his life. In this account of his life Gao has deliberately divorced himself from his past: he refers to his younger self in the third person and to his present 1990s self in the second person throughout, which at times makes it something of a challenge to follow the dual threads but is still a neat literary device. Often heavy going and ponderous (as one might expect from a Nobel Laureate), it nevertheless does offer a unique first-hand insight into the paranoid nightmare that was everyday life under Mao.  PY

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