Soul Mountain

In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death.B ut six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer — he had won "a second reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is .

Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.

“Chinese literature [of the future] will have to contend with the creative energy and the daring of Gao Xingjian.”

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“It is a relief to come to a book that celebrates the pleasures of literature with such gusto and knowingness.”

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“His largest and perhaps most personal work…Gao has created a sui generis work, one that, in combining story, reminiscence, meditation and journalism, warily comes to terms with the shocks of both Maoism and capitalism.”

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