Soul Mountain
by Gao Xingjian
A Chinese writer disappears into the mountains to find himself.
For you if
you want to understand what China looks like from its own forgotten interior rather than its gleaming coast
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A writer is misdiagnosed with lung cancer and takes it as permission to disappear into rural China — the mountains, the rivers, the villages where the old ways still exist, the people who have been left behind by modernization. Gao Xingjian writes in shifting pronouns — I, you, he, she — so that the narrator keeps splitting and reforming. A dispatch from inside China's interior landscape, both geographical and psychological. Won the Nobel Prize in 2000. Banned in China. The most interior Chinese dispatch on this shelf — not history or politics but a man trying to find something in the silence that the city had covered over.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- China • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Chinese author
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