Contemporary Chinese fiction is bold, brave and confident; often elegant and whimsical, as in the work of Dai Sijie. It is, also, defiant as epitomised by Yan Lianke’s fearless, polemical satires, and invariably profound. Rage is rarely presented with the dignity of Yiyun Li’s devastating debut novel, The Vagrants.
Chinese fiction is frequently undercut with an intuitive grasp of the absurdity of human existence. Thanks to the work of gifted literary translators, Western readers are increasingly being given a chance to experience narratives written by writers aware of their political context as well as the magnificent traditional stories that shape their consciousness.
Today is Chinese New Year, marking the beginning of the Year of the Goat, or as some would say the Year of the Sheep - take your pick - and in making a humble bow to the greatness that is China and to heroic writers whose art is brilliantly matched by their courage and philosophical wisdom, it offers a timely moment to suggest a sample offering of some of my personal favourites.
Firstly though is a detailed look at Soul Mountain by China’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gao Xingjian. It is a thoughtful, slow moving novel which opens many doors for an eager Western reader.
One man’s personal and philosophical odyssey evolves against the dramatic backdrop of Central China’s ancient forests Soul Mountain is an unexpectedly adventurous narrative. It is ar less concerned with plot than with the randomness and inevitability of existence.
Dramatist, visual artist and translator of Beckett and Ionesco, Gao Xingjian, confronts not only himself, his past, his failure to act and the relentless passivity of being human in this strange, offbeat meditation, he most of all explores the idea of being alive and alone.
Part novel, part philosophical tract and probably neither, the glory of this book resides in is not attempting to offer any answers: “Fiction is different from philosophy” Gao suggests, “because it is the product of sensory perceptions . . . Furthermore, it is the same as life and does not have an ultimate goal.”
Described as a picaresque, it instead belongs to that curious and fascinating genre of intellectual quest narratives dominated now, forever perhaps, by the great German writer W.G. Sebald. Despite its 500 pages, Soul Mountain never achieves either the prevailing genius or the intellectual density of The Rings of Saturn (1995; English translation 1998).
It also lacks Sebald’s discipline and could easily have lost at least 100 pages. Nor is it as eloquent as Claudio Magris’s graceful elegy Danube (1986; 1989), but it certainly elevates the individual to centre stage with a freedom Chinese writer have never enjoyed. Gao moves between the first, second and third person with deliberate abandon.
He can be melancholic, profound, at times, even quite irritating - as he is during the many theatrical exchanges between variations of a warring he and she - but he is also relaxed and humorous, and often settles into a beguiling conversational tone that simply carries the narrative along.
Mabel Lee the translator is alert to the shifts in mood and tone. It must be said, if you take to this book, you will stay with it.
The journey may appear random, but the motivation is not. The narrator has been given a reprieve from death. This is why he sets off, less to find something than to discover what Everyman is about to lose; life itself.
So he heads for the heart of China. “Before this long trip, after being diagnosed with lung cancer by the doctor, all I could do every day was to go to the park on the outskirts of the city.” It is based on Gao’s personal experience. His narrator is informed, as was Gao, that he is about to die from the same disease that killed his father. A later set of tests prove negative.
The narrator, already middle aged, unmarried and childless, begins a journey to discover himself. There may not be a plot but there are two recurring motifs which almost become characters; childhood and death.
While searching for himself, he actually finds his country. Among the many things one takes a way from this book is the size, diversity and allure of China. There are many dazzling set pieces, usually descriptions of places: “So you arrive in Wuyizhen, on a long and narrow street inlaid with black cobblestones, and walking along this cobblestone street with its deep single wheel rut, you suddenly enter your childhood, you seem to have spent in an old mountain town like this . . . Cyclists here need the skills of an acrobat . . . they cause loud swearing as they weave through people with carrying poles or pulling wooden carts . . . It is loud colourful swearing which mingles with the general din of the hawkers’ calls, bargaining, joking and laughing.”
As he surveys the scene, he muses: “Had fate not otherwise decreed, you could have been born in this town, grown up and married here.” On he wanders, meeting various characters, some friendly, others less so. All the while he is observing, gathering bits of information and stories. More intriguing, for the reader, as well as for the narrator, he revisits the history of China and also encounters his country’s rich natural world.
“In the maple and linden forest . . . the old botanist who came with me onto the mountain discovers a giant metasequoia. It is a living fern fossil more than 40 metres high, a solitary remnant of the Ice-Age a million years ago, but if I look right up to the tips of the gleaming branches some tiny new leaves can be seen.”
Whether when describing a crowd’s reaction to the daring feats and obvious pain of a brave girl contortionist or in the many references to the appalling treatment of women, the China which emerges is a cruel place. Gao never sentimentalises his country, to attempt to would never convince. The national ambience is of harsh practicality and a shrewd logic.
Even as he admires its natural beauty, he remains alert to the many dangers: “There was a journalist who kept going on about the giant panda being as cute as a pet cat and he got into the enclosure to have his photo taken with his arms around one they’d caught at the ranger station at the foot of the mountain. He got his genitals torn off and was immediately driven to Chengdu, fighting for his life.”
The same old botanist in whose company the narrator admires the ancient fossil fern, harbours few illusions about mankind: “This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he’s capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.”
It is one of the sharpest observations made in the book, and it is something which the narrator hears. Gao appears to listen to others as closely as he does to his own heart and imagination which explains why this admittedly demanding book is so important and rewarding to read.
Many asides make oblique references to official restrictions Gao has suffered during his career. Ironically for a silenced writer he is far less political than say, Yan Lianke. Often throughout this book, Gao, through his narrator, ponders the exact nature of what he is writing and even includes a chapter (which he later refers to as “optional”) to debate this “but as you’ve read it you’ve read it all”.
For all its candour and the annoying exchanges between He and She - or the male and female selves - it is a romantic book written by a pragmatist. Seen another way, it is a pragmatic book from a romantic. More pertinently, it is curiously European, but then Gao has lived more than half his life in France and has sustained a sense of being an outsider. He is certainly an individual.
Such is the overwhelming mood of loneliness that the narrative does feel like a quest, albeit one of an abstract nature. The search for self places the narrative between cultures which provides a valuable key to the Western reader. China is seen as a country caught been the ancient and the modern.
Gao had begun writing it while he was still living in Beijing, in the summer of 1982. Five years later and still working on it, he moved to France, completing it in Paris in 1989. It was finally published in Taiwan the following year. As already suggested, it is a narrative with which to grapple and enjoy; a rich soup of a book.
Gao constantly makes the reader feel privy to his thoughts, any thoughts, all thoughts, even the half-formed ones. Though not a story, it is instead many stories, the most enduring of which are the most simple such as when he visits the home for solitary aged in which he believes the grandmother he barely remembers may have died.
He is told that her death happened about ten years earlier. He is undaunted. “Nevertheless, I have finally visited my deceased maternal grandmother who once bought me a spinning top.” This is what Gao does best, he pushes us back, deep into a chair, not only to listen, but to think.
Born in 1940 shortly after the Japanese invaded China, Gao Xingjian laments his dead by imagining them gathered at a table to which he is yet to be invited. For a book so personal, it never becomes an oppressive study of self. Instead it is a journey about an individual, any individual, as it is a book about thoughts, any thoughts.
It rambles yet it is deliberate. It is also a diverse insight or rather a series of diverse insights into life as lived in contemporary China - allowing for the many changes which have occurred since it was originally written.
Read as a philosophical tract, a confession, or a voyage of discovery or as an attempt to make sense of a country or of a life, it is a book that beckons with gentle if determined intent.
