Gao Xingjian Soul Mountain Reading Order

Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain (1990) is one of the most unusual novels of the twentieth century — a book that resists every conventional description. Written in exile after Gao was diagnosed with (and then found not to have) lung cancer and then fled the Cultural Revolution's aftermath to travel alone through the remote mountains and forests of southwestern China, it is at once a travel narrative, an inner monologue, a collection of Chinese folk tales and myths, an inquiry into identity (the narrator splits into 'I,' 'you,' and 'he'), and a meditation on solitude, freedom, and the nature of the Chinese literary tradition. Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 — the first Chinese-language writer to receive it — for a body of work that includes both prose and drama written in what the Swedish Academy called 'bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.'