Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Soul Mountain
    Unavailable
    Soul Mountain
    Unavailable
    Soul Mountain
    Ebook636 pages13 hours

    Soul Mountain

    By Gao Xingjian

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    “If a successful novelist is one who tells us something new about the human spirit and a successful novel transports us to another world, then Gao and Soul Mountain have succeeded spectacularly.” — Washington Post Book World

    An extraordinary work of immense wisdom and profound beauty by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

    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 the cancer was gone, and he was 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 and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.

    A bold, lyrical, prodigious novel, Soul Mountain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor. Interwoven with a myriad of stories and countless memorable characters—from venerable Daoist masters and Buddhist nuns to mythical Wild Men, deadly Qichun snakes, and farting buses—is the narrator's poignant inner journey and search for freedom.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 17, 2009
    ISBN9780061752568
    Author

    Gao Xingjian

    Gao Xingjian (whose name is pronounced gow shing-jen) is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he has lived in France since 1987. Gao Xingjian is an artistic innovator, in both the visual arts and literature. He is that rare multitalented artist who excels as novelist, playwright, essayist, director, and painter. In addition to Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, a book of his plays, The Other Shore, and a volume of his paintings, Return to Painting, have been published in the United States.

    Read more from Gao Xingjian

    Related authors

    Related to Soul Mountain

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How High We Go In The Dark

      Dec 29, 2021

      ▸ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Sequoia Nagamatsu ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury There are surprisingly few SF stories about death. Sure, many books and films kill off characters. But only a handful – like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or Te

      1 min read

    • Article

      If You Are Permanently Lost

      Dec 15, 2019

      I never have any idea where I am. I lived my whole childhood in the purple foothills of the same five-square-mile town and I still couldn’t tell you whether you turn left or right on the single thruway to get to the grade school or the grocery store,

      7 min read

    • Article

      Critical Conditions

      Mar 1, 2020

      Critical Conditions
      5 min read

    • Article

      Revolutions In The Margins

      May 1, 2020

      Revolutions In The Margins
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 261

      Dec 5, 2023

      The Art of Fiction No. 261
      28 min read

    • Article

      Old Ways, New Forms

      Sep 6, 2023

      Old Ways, New Forms
      5 min read

    • Article

      Autobiography

      Nov 5, 2021

      Autobiography
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: McKenzie Wark

      Dec 13, 2023

      In 2023, it was a lot of books connected one way or another to raving, transsexuality, and autofiction. The post A Year in Reading: McKenzie Wark appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      7 Books to Read on World AIDS Day

      Nov 26, 2019

      So Lucky, by award-winning author Nicola Griffith, is a fascinatingly intense, semiautobiographical novel about a woman facing down her demons. The profoundly personal narrative reads much like a memoir, and readers can’t help but empathize with prot

      4 min read

    • Article

      Curriculum

      Mar 10, 2020

      Curriculum
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Woman Behind theWords

      Sep 1, 2020

      The Woman Behind theWords
      6 min read

    • Article

      Like Father, Like Son

      Jan 2, 2022

      In the middle of the night, after a particularly tough day of interrogations in a Beijing security facility, the artist and dissident Ai Weiwei began to write what would become 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrow: A memoir. His tough, implacable interrogat

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Woman Behind the Words

      Sep 1, 2020

      The Woman Behind the Words
      6 min read

    • Article

      Alternative Perspectives

      Sep 1, 2019

      Edited by Kurt Tong Published by Jiazazhi Press/Library, Ningbo, 2019 A decadent sponge cake, a three-tiered arrangement of steamed lotus-seed buns, and a pile of ham-and-cheese sandwiches are spread out among other party foods before a table of chil

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Mirror and the Palette Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits

      Nov 1, 2022

      The Mirror and the Palette Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits Jennifer Higgie Hachette RRP $24.99 AUD “She looks at herself, again and again. She’s in London or Paris or Helsinki or Sydney. She’s in a village by

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 259

      Jun 5, 2023

      The Art of Fiction No. 259
      32 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 249

      Jun 8, 2021

      The Art of Fiction No. 249
      30 min read

    • Article

      Get To Know A Few Queer Trailblazers

      Jul 31, 2022

      Known for: helping declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder A relentless gay-rights activist, Barbara Gittings is as staunch as they come. She grew up in the US at a time when psychiatrists believed they could ‘cure’ gay people, but young Gitti

      4 min read

    Reviews for Soul Mountain

    3.5/5

    292 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I didn't fall in love with this book although it leaves you with a hankering to visit China. I found the stories too disjointed for my liking.
    • 3/5
      Context is important. I was newly married and jumping through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops. I found a stack of copies of this novel remaindered. I bought them all. I mailed one to my wife and gave the others way. I then read this in tandem with a friend who was being chucked out of his house. Oh, it wasn't a foreclosure. He was leaving his wife, though sooner than he expected, obviously. I then began dogpaddling through this morass of a novel rife with nature and strange sex. It didn't reach me. I don't think my friend was touched either.

      A month later while on the tube in London I saw someone reading it. I wanted to warm him. Maybe my reluctance to do so stemmed from an awareness of context.
    • 3/5
      Good read, but a little over-rated - not Nobel prize winning stuff.Read in Samoa, April 2002
    • 4/5
      An unusual book, one I found quite difficult to read, largely because of its complete lack of forward momentum. There is no strong narrative running throughout, and the characters are similarly muddled. I felt like the book could be equally well enjoyed reading the chapters in random order. But this muddling is clearly all deliberate, and in small doses it can be wonderfully enjoyable. The writing is always very good and often really quite beautiful. In the end, I was left mainly with the feeling that something had probably been lost in translation, and that the story in the original Chinese was likely much richer.
    • 1/5
      This book holds the impressive record of being the worst I have ever read! Impossible to follow, because if any scene showed any signs of being interesting the narrative immediately switched to something entirely new. There weren't any characters as such, just obscure beings labelled 'you' and 'he' and 'she'. The blurb on the back cover promised a 'journey into modern day China', which sounded absolutely fascinating and persuaded me to buy it. Unfortunately the text does nothing to conjure up modern day China, and the novel could just as easily have been set in modern day Milton Keynes.
    • 1/5
      Book written by an intellectual that wandered around China for a few years to keep from being arrested. It is a work of fiction but is based on his travels and the things running through his mind. It lost me at times but it was an enjoyable read. Not a have to have, check it out of the library.
    • 5/5
      Not an easy read. So intense that it's overwhelming; poetic, melancholy, surreal, beautiful. One of my favourite books.
    • 2/5
      Soul Mountain- Gao Xingjian - another reading group choice. Only 2 out of 10 of us managed to get past the opening chapters. I did like some episodes, but overall found it incredibly slow, miserable, meandering and plotless. To add insult to injury, towards the end of the book the guy actually has a good laugh about his book being unreadable! If anyone has any doubt that the Nobel is awarded on a political rather than a literary agenda, this clinches it.