Essays Book

This book of essays and speeches covers a lot of ground in its 166 pages. Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, has had his viewpoint influenced by his life in China and his exile in the West (France). Under the communist regime, the content of books and plays is dictated by the Party; in the West, in can be dictated by fashion and commercial pressure. For his own part, Gao Xingjian has attempted a literature of the individual, avoiding any isms.

A quote at random:

Revolutionising form should not become a sort of superstition. Is there any certainty that what comes later will be able to negate what came earlier? The idea that only the new is good has become the disease of our times, and probably has become the collective subconscious of consumerist society. But art is not merchandise, and for the artist, being able to reject market forces is critical to his being able to write good works, because these forces exert pressures harder to resist than politics or social customs.

The reason I gave four stars instead of five, is that The Case for Literature contains a certain amount of the repetitiveness that such collections sometimes suffer from. But it's well worth reading.