Soul Mountain

I started reading this book because the title 'Soul Mountain' seemed very evocative. I ended up reading a work that exceeded my initial expectations of it. This semi-autobiographical travelogue, if I may call it that (this work defies easy characterization in terms of genre), is based on the authors five-month travels in peripheral provinces of China among the Miao, Yi, Jiangsu, Tibetan, and Qiang people. The author mixes this with his fantasies and day-dreams and philosophical reflections on a wide range of topics - men and women, history, nostalgia, madness, loneliness, pain, archaeology, nature, conservation, environment, Buddhism, Daoism, occult, sorcery, banditry etc. The novel has two interwoven streams - one is the authors fantasies of woman and the other is his travel experiences. In a writing style that seems a curious mixture of that of French and Chinese writers, the author gives poetic descriptions of pain, wonder, astonishment, degradation, fear, terror, hunger, fatigue, nature, folk songs, history, ruins, personalities, childhood, sex and so on. The novel is not a story but a road novel. It does not have a beginning, peak and climax. It is a journey - always begun and never ended. I have read about thirty of so 'classic' novels. This one stands out as the most memorable, although this is my subjective opinion. There is no plot to describe here, but everyone will find a lot to identify in this novel.

Soul Mountain is a beautiful book. It is a spherical tapestry of a man's journey inward and outward, surrounding us in the myths, the landscapes, the laneways and the back street temples of China past and present. In the first pages, the narrator relates how he decided to go off to find Lingshan - 'ling' meaning 'soul or spirit' and 'shan' meaning 'mountain' - through a chance encounter with a stranger on a train. From there the identities of the narrator and the stranger become interwoven, just as the search for the elusive mountain at the source of the You river takes us through the painful, ephemeral beauty of personal life and national history. Gao Xingjian is a master of the visual: I found myself continually following his images in my mind, ending up far away from the printed page, back in my own wanderings alone in China.Soul Mountain is not a linear novel that can be rushed through or read diagonally.Meetings with friends or strangers, attempts at conversation, lines of poetry, real or made up stories, incidents and musings flow together like leaves on the surface of a stream. And like leaves, they touch each other, carry each other along for a while and then separate to continue their journeys alone. The I-narrator is transformed into he then you then she, just as the eagle rock in the night forest becomes an old woman shaman, a beautiful girl and a terrifying demon. The novel works through association and evocation, with a powerful sense of the significance of place and time in an individual's life and no need to create anything more binding than purely personal order. This doesn't mean that it is chaotic or illegible. You get so caught up in it that you accept the uncertainties of where you are going because of the intense pleasure of the journey there.

I must admit that, when the Nobel prize was anounced last year , that I had never heard of the author Gao Xingjian, a feeling I shared most probably with 95% of the rest of the world. My first reaction was: how nice that the price has gone to China, but couldn't they have chosen one of the more well known writers?I think it was the Washington Post Review which defended the choice by saying, amongst other things, that the Nobel committe has chosen unknown writers before and they quoted Mahfouz, my absolute favorite writer and Saramango as examples. Therefore I decide to read Snow Mountain.Not to my regret! Soul Mountain is an epic voyage through China, through the inner self of the writer through philosophy, through I don't know what. You can read the book on several levels. His observations on China are wonderful and anybody who has traveled in that great country will recognize something about the strangeness and mystique that lure around every corner whilst at the same time also recognizing many of the very down to earth tableaus of the daily struggle for life.Quite often I had the feeling of being taken back into Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance or Thomas Mann's the Magic Mountain; here you are reading about a very ordinary situation and all of a sudden you are taken into a major philosophical treatise.The struggle of the writer with his inner self are dripping from every page. This perhaps, more than anything else, defines the strength of this book. It is a soul-searching effort which fortunately most people are not capable of. It would certainly not benefit my mental health to do the same. It felt gratified when it appeared at the end that the writer seemed to have found a workable peace in himself.Gao writes sometimes tenderly, sometimes coolly analyzing, sometimes rebuffing and that all magnifies the power of this book; it seems that in all instances, without having control over them, he is capable of describing his feelings.It is not an easy book to read. It does not have a plot and writing about feelings ensures a lack of coherence. However, he seems at all stages very much in command of what he is doing.I am sure I have to read it a second, and even a third time to be able to grasp everything Gao wants to communicate and I will.I will not comment on whether this book is worth a Nobel Prize but I know that, once again, the Nobel Committee has given us a writer of utmost quality which otherwise I would not have found.

I was attracted to the Soul Mountain by the negative remarks of my compatriots. I agree with everyone that there are many great Chinese writers in China, but their works have not been introduced to readers in other cultures due to the great difficulty of the Chinese language. I was a little doubtful myself that the Soul Mountain may not be representative of achievement of Chinese writers, but was among the lucky few noticed by the world. As I read, however, I could not put it down. Gao Xingjian absolutely deserves the Nobel prize. I have read enough of both English and Chinese authors to tell. I am overwhelmed, awed, amazed, dazzled, and deeply humbled at this powerful writing. There are so many things he is searching answers for. It will take me much more serching, much more thinking, much more exploring than my limited talent and experience could afford to be able to fully understand everything in this book. As far as I can tell, rarely has one writer ever produced as soul-searching, as provoking, as pounding a note in one single volume. How a work of such complexity is translated into other languages and accepted by other cultures is nothing short of a miracle. On the other hand, I believe Gao Xingjian's writing is a poem that transcends geographic border, time, and cultures. It searches answers for universal questions that have perplexed people everywhere at all times. I can't but feel sorry for those who allege that Gao won the Nobel Prize only by denigrating China. He doesn't have time nor does he need to denigrate China. There were already tons and tons of works on the Cultural Revolution and its calamities. He is not a historian or politician. He is a poet, a philosopher, a fine human being who takes life seriously. I have read many other books on all kinds of subjects. But few, in my view, have achieved this standing. Some may have achieved in several books what he has in one chapter, or in one small tale. Some have sweated in many volumes to achieve what he achieved on one subject. This artful weaving of facts and magic, present and history, folklores and modernity, reality and imagination presents a perfect reading for those who love literature and who also are looking for a meaning of life.