Author: Gao Xingjian
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 510
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0066211344
Description
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is a bold, lyrical, prodigious novel which probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor.
In 1983 Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death. But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer - he had won a reprieve from death and had been thrown back into the world of the living. Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison far, Gao fled Beijing. He traveled to the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China and from there back to the east coast, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometers over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is this work - Soul Mountain.
Interwoven with a myriad of stories and countless memorable characters - from venerable Daoist masters and Buddhist nuns to mythical wild men, deadly Sichuan snakes, and farting buses - is the narrator's poignant inner journey and reach for freedom.
PRAISE FOR THIS WORK:
Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves. In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses. - From the Citation of the Swedish Academy (Nobel Prize Committee)