Soul Mountain was written by a Chinese novelist, translator, dramatist, director, critic and artist Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain was a beautiful book and a portrait of physical as well as spiritual journeys. It is not a light book. The first one-third part of the book is rather engaging and enjoyable but the second one-third part of the book is dense and confusing. Overall it is a sort of book that needs a year on reading. Soul Mountain is a novel but it contained all such things, which a novel is not supposed to have. Gao already knew that this unconventional style of writing fiction would elicit objections from the general readers, that is why, he include a short chapter about what counts as fiction. It is an autobiographical work in which Gao portrays his journey of seven years, which is at once physical and spiritual.
Gao Xingjian began writing this novel in communist China in 1982 and finished it in Paris in 1989. During the period of 60s to 80s he was a renowned writer in China but the Communist Government would not allow his works to be published. The Government authorities of China considered him a man whose ideas are inclined towards the capitalist west. At that time Gao discovered that he had lung Cancer. It was the wrong diagnosis but had affected him irrevocably. He fled Beijing and traveled for ten months through southwest China. In this novel Gao symbolically portrays his quest for his self by the quest of Soul Mountain. In this quest, he encountered different experiences. He met with Chinese ethnic minorities and documents their traditions and customs. He visits temples and forests but his basic desire remains the companionship of humans.
The plot of the Novel is the quest of the author to a mythical S...
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When this novel was awarded the Nobel Prize, Chinese Foreign Minister said that this award was nothing but a political maneuver and hence the Chinese nation has no pride on it. The members of the Chinese Communist party-line literati have questioned that whether the author and the novel are Nobel material or not. Fortunately, Goran Malmqvist, who had translated the Gao’s plays and produced them for Stockholm is an expert on China and also one of the academy member, who make the selection of Nobel laureates, so he paved the way for Gao Xingjian to get his Nobel Prize.
Works Cited
Champeon, Kenneth, Mountain Del Soul, ThingsAsian, February 5, 2002, http://kenneth.champeon.com/mountain.html
Freeman, John, Dissident pens a 'Walden,' Asian-style, http://63.147.65.175/books/soulmt1217.htm
Xingjian, Gao, Soul Mountain, Harper Collins, Nov 2001
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Stump, Colleen Shea, Kevin Feldman, Joyce Armstrong Carroll, and Edward E. Wilson. "The Epic." Prentice Hall
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