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Soul Mountain

By: Gao Xingjian Gao Xingjian
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Flamingo
ISBN: 0007119224
ISBN-13: 9780007119226
Released: 19 Feb 2001
RRP: £9.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

A book of great depth and visual richness - By: varske, 24 Jun 2001
I agree with everything the previous reviewer says. I would describe it as the sort of book you cannot put down, but I realised it took me several days to read just because I wandered off so many times thinking about the visual images & the ideas I was caught up in from the book.

At first I found the idea of alll the pronouns a bit intimidating or pretentious but on the second reading, it seemed more natural.

I particularly liked the ink on paper painting at the beginning, made by the author.

The Intense Pleasure of the Journey - By: molliew@netmedia.net.il, 21 Feb 2001
Soul Mountain is a beautiful book. It is a spherical tapestry of a man's journey inward & outward, surrounding us in the myths, the landscapes, the laneways & the back street temples of China past & present. In the first pages, the narrator relates how he decided to go off to find Lingshan - 'ling' meaning 'soul or spirit' & 'shan' meaning 'mountain' - through a chance encounter with a stranger on a train. From there the identities of the narrator & 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 & national history. Gao Xingjian is a master of the visual: I found myself continuallly 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 diagonallly. Meetings with friends or strangers, attempts at conversation, lines of poetry, real or made up stories, incidents & 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 & 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 & a terrifying demon.

The novel works through association & evocation, with a powerful sense of the significance of place & time in an individual's life & 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.