Soul Mountain

The premise inverts a reprieve into a crisis: an unnamed writer receives what turns out to be a false lung cancer diagnosis, the same disease that killed his father, and, freed from an execution date he'd already begun accepting, doesn't return gratefully to his old life but instead sets out toward Lingshan, 'Soul Mountain,' a place a fellow train passenger mentions almost in passing and that no map can confirm. Gao Xingjian made a real journey of some fifteen thousand kilometers over five months through Sichuan's forests and the Yangtze's source country, and the novel's travelogue passages, on panda reserves, Taoist hermits, and Miao and Qiang village ritual, carry the specific weight of things actually seen rather than researched.

The book's most radical choice is grammatical before it's thematic: the narrator splits across 'I' and 'you', with 'you' narrating an entire parallel courtship, an unnamed woman met and lost on the road, that 'I' never directly claims as his own. Loneliness, desire, and the search for Lingshan all turn out to be the same problem asked from different grammatical distances: how much of a self can a person actually locate, and does naming it 'I' bring anyone closer to finding it than calling it 'you' does?

The novel's eighty-one chapters split almost exactly down the middle between two grammatical registers, 'you' narrating the odd chapters through the first half and then the even ones for the rest, 'I' taking the alternating slots, so that partway through the book the two voices trade positions without announcement. Nothing marks the handoff inside the text itself, which is the method: Gao cares less about which pronoun is 'really' narrating than about showing that the distinction was always provisional, a scaffolding the reader supplies rather than one the book insists on.

Gao had already left China for France in 1987 and become a French citizen a decade later when the Swedish Academy awarded him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first ever given for a work originally written in Chinese. Beijing's response bordered on erasure: Soul Mountain and Gao's other books remain unpublished on the mainland, and state media downplayed the prize as a political gesture rather than a literary judgment. Mabel Lee's English translation, years in the making alongside Gao himself, became for most non-Chinese readers the only door into a novel whose home country still won't publish it.