Gao Xingjian Soul Mountain

About Soul Mountain

Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain (1990) is one of the most unusual novels of the twentieth century — a book written after its author was misdiagnosed with lung cancer and fled to travel alone through the remote mountains of southwestern China. Part travel narrative, part inner monologue, part collection of Chinese folk tales and myth, it splits its narrator into 'I,' 'you,' and 'he' in an inquiry into identity, solitude, and freedom that draws on Chinese folk tradition and European modernism simultaneously. Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 — the first Chinese-language writer to receive it — for work the Swedish Academy described with 'bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.' The novel is banned in China, where the government rejected the Nobel Prize as politically motivated.