Word: nobelity
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...prestigious math contest in the world. It's also a rite of passage for math cognoscenti--think of it as a coming-out party for the next generation of beautiful minds. Do well, and you'll earn the envy of your peers and the inside track on a future Nobel. Do badly and--well, don't feel too bad. John Nash took the test twice and never scored among the top five...
...after two years trapped in the Nobel's gilded cage, Gao is back at work on an ambitious production of his latest drama, Snow in August, which opens at Taipei's National Theatre on Dec. 19. Of course, the Nobel Prize does have its advantages. Thanks to Gao's literary celebrity, the production budget is unusually generous, allowing him 60 actors, a choir and a 70-member orchestra. All that manpower has created an unclassifiable theatrical experience. "It's not a drama, or a Peking opera, or modern dance, or Western opera," says Gao. It's all of the above...
...When Chinese authorities tried to squelch his voice in the early 1980s, he fled his home in Beijing, first into the rural wilds of China, later to exile in France, penning a sprawling novel, Soul Mountain, partially about his flight. In 2000, it helped him win an utterly unexpected Nobel Prize in Literature, the first by a Chinese author. To many writers, the Nobel has proved a curse, triggering furious envy from rivals, and intensifying crippling perfor-mance anxiety. And some critics carped that Gao was an undeserving mediocrity, hinting that he won only because of his relationship with Goran...
...center, yet not of the center," observes one of his English translators, Prof. Gilbert Fong. "This is what he tries to capture in his writing." For Gao, detachment is just another word for freedom, the freedom to live and to write what he described in his Nobel acceptance speech as "cold literature," art that "refuses to be strangled by society...
...Today Gao is adjusting to what he calls his "second exile," his escape from Nobel celebrity. After Taipei, he will retool Snow in August for a production in Marseilles, where 2003 has been declared the Year of Gao Xingjian. Regardless of plaudits, prizes and criticism, Gao will no doubt continue along his solitary, unflinching path. "I think he has an interior mission," says translator Dutrait. "He's determined to go all the way to the end, the end of his dreams of total art, of cinema, painting, novels, theater, everything. And he must go faster. He sees the time passing...