A man travels the length and breadth of China, collecting stories, folk songs, lovers and experience in a search for meaning . . .
In 1982 dissident Chinese playwright, novelist and artist, Gao Xingjian, was diagnosed with lung cancer, the very disease which had killed his father. For six weeks Gao inhabited a transcendental state of imminent death, treating himself to the finest foods he could afford, while spending time reading in an old graveyard in the Beijing suburbs. But a secondary examination revealed there was no cancer - he had won "a reprieve from the death sentence" 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 farm, Gao fled Beijing. He travelled first to the ancient forests of central China and from there to the east coast, passing through eight provinces and seven nature reserves, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometres over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is 'Soul Mountain'.
This is a novel of immense wisdom and profound beauty, bursting with knowledge and experience and portraying a culture as vast and fascinating as the history of humankind itself. It is part travel diary, part philosophical treatise, part love story and part fable. It is a fictionalised autobiography and documentation of the Gao's journey through the Chinese hinterland.
Written over a period of eight years, the novel provides the author with the space to fully explore existential issues, human history, as well as the absurdity of his own reality and personal history.
