Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

An aimless wanderer (or two) in Southwest China

Chinese-French writer Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in China in 1940, emigrated to France in 1997, and writes in the Chinese language. His novel Soul Mountain was published in 1990.

An unnamed writer of literature has gotten into trouble with the authorities in Beijing for the controversial content of his writings. He leaves the capital and takes an extended journey out west to Sichuan, sometimes venturing over the border into Tibet and other surrounding areas. He lived in this region when he was younger, so he knows much of the local history and folklore. This writer tells the people he meets that he’s looking for material for an upcoming literary work, but that really just seems like an excuse for him to do some soul searching. He gravitates towards remnants of pre-modern China—old-growth forests, isolated Daoist temples, and lonely mountaintops—and he searches for a legendary location called Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Along the way he meets a woman, also a solo traveler, and they become romantically, or at least sexually, involved. Actually, there is more than one woman over the course of the book, but there seems to be one who predominates over the others. It’s unclear what this woman is doing while he’s off visiting historical and archaeological sites. Is she just waiting in the hotel for him to return? Or, perhaps, are the chapters arranged in nonchronological order?

One of the annoying aspects of Soul Mountain is that none of the characters have names. At times, stories are related in which historical and mythical personages are named, but no one in the primary present-tense narrative has a name, just “the woman,” “the lawyer,” “my friend,” etc. Even more frustrating is the way that Gao switches the narration from first-person to second-person seemingly indiscriminately. The protagonist is known only as “I” or “you.” Later in the book there’s a “he,” and I don’t know who the hell was supposed to be the antecedent for that pronoun.

The summary above is how I read the novel, but I found out afterwards from Wikipedia that “I” and “you” are supposed to be two different characters, and Soul Mountain is actually two novels intertwined. If I have to find that out from Wikipedia, then the author hasn’t done his job very well. In chapter 72, Gao breaks the fourth wall and briefly touches upon his use of pronouns, but it’s the very definition of too little, too late. I think most people reading Soul Mountain (in its English translation, at least) would interpret the book exactly as I did.

The novel is set in the 1980s. The Cultural Revolution in China was over by then, but it is mentioned frequently by the characters as a recent memory. Soul Mountain is critical of many aspects of life under Chinese Communism—restrictions of civil liberties, unwieldy bureaucracy, degradation of the environment, censorship of literature and journalism, cruel and unusual punishment, and more. I liked Soul Mountain for what it taught me about China. It functions as an insider’s travelogue to this region of China during a certain period in history, but I could have probably gotten the same experience from a Lonely Planet guidebook or some travel memoir. I enjoyed the travel chapters much more than the chapters that chronicle the relations between the writer and his female partner(s). The sex scenes are off-putting, not because of any graphic sexual content but because of the odd and disturbing conversations they have. As a fictional narrative, there isn’t much of a novel here at all, just a collection of scenes. At first, it seems as if an actual story will be told, but as the book progresses it gets more abstract until Gao is just writing down seemingly random thoughts. I didn’t care about the characters, who never seemed to develop or progress or learn anything over time.