Soul Mountain

Rating:
Summary: This book is going to kill me, I just know it.
Review: While I understand that this must be a wonderful book (as The New York Times Book Review is rarely in error) I must admit that I am NOT enjoying it. I've been reading the thing for over a week and have only managed to struggle through one hundred and fifty-six pages. It is a painstaking, disjointed, cumbersome read. I do not find the characters engaging and the changes in tense are distracting to say the least. Considering his travels, I would have expected more socio-political information, and a little less nonsense regarding his bedmates.
If I didn't have a strict rule against such things, I'd put this book in the recycle pile right now. However, I believe that if you start a book, (no matter how dull) you finish it- otherwise the book wins.
I'm quite certain I must be wrong in my judgement, since it won the Nobel Prize, but at this point I simply don't get it. Maybe it gets better. It could still get better. Someone PLEASE tell me it gets better...

Rating:
Summary: Soul Mountain Review 2
Review: A close re-reading reveals Soul Mountain as the author's mindful imaginations in life. The purpose of searching of "Lingshan" (Soul Mountain) came about when the author was diagnosed having lung cancer. Later on the book the author divulged that he was in fact mis-diagnosed. It is amazing how one decided to pack up and go off on a journey searching for the utopia, enjoying the quietness for the rest of life. This is how all the first-person and second-person reflections come about: Reality vs. Imagination. The quest for "Lingshan" reflects on the desire for happiness, peace, and joy. "Ling" in Chinese means the "soul". Soul mountain might imply the meaning of life fulfillment. The author's actual journey was to evade from reality and the suffering from the terminal disease.

Rating:
Summary: Quite Difficult to Comprehend What's Real and Imagined...
Review: A third-grader would know enough vocabulary to read this book from beginning to end. It is what the philosophical implication of the work that baffles me, and probably, many. Instead of being a novel, Soul Mountain reads as if it is made up of 80 short stories (the book is divided into 80 chapters). Call it diary or freelance essays, the chapters don't seem to have apparent connection with one another. I do not quite understand the implications of "I" and "you" used throughout the work. It seems to me that "you" is actually the reflection of "I". "You" and "I" are used in alternating fashion throughout the book. The authorial self is thus (I guess) divided into first-person and second-person perspectives. It seems that the author reflects on his actual trip when he uses "You". Again I might have to re-read and find the answer.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but ultimately a disappointment
Review: Soul Mountain works best when it's read as an examination of China's struggle to overcome its rural backwardness (circa 1983) brought on by the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, and how this struggle for modernity affects the lives of its people (peasants, mostly). On this level, Gao provides a fascinating study. The book reads more as a piece of non-fiction travel essay than straight fiction as the author recounts his wanderings through rural China after a misdiagnosis of terminal illness and a run-in with the Chinese communist bureaucracy.

Where the book falters are in the chapters devoted to "You" and "She", ostensibly the narrator's alter egos. What I believe is meant to be a dialogue about sex and male/female relationships, while interesting at first, becomes tiresome and trite, as though the author is trying really hard to be profound while not really breaking any new ground.

On the whole, an interesting, though ultimately disappointing read, which is a shame because I'd heard such good things.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Style Yet Disappointing Content
Review: Although this is considered one of the author's best volumes, I was rather disappointed at the lack of literary quality that the book offers. The style used becomes better and better as one advances through the book, yet there are few passages which can be deemed to contain truly remarkable prose. The reader can find it useful, however, to read "Soul Mountain" because an interesting overview of everyday-life people dealing with the problems of Communism is given. Considering that I was born in and lived in a communist country for a while, I found it relevant to compare some of the social phenomena related to Chinese Communism to those encountered in Europe in the 1980s.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult but rewarding journey
Review: To read through the vast preambling journey of this book is to immerse oneself in the writers opinions, dreams and troubles. All written in a collage of wafting imagery. I found myself awed at times, bored at times, then succinctly thoughtful and introspective at other times.
Which is precisely what a great novel is supposed to do!
To follow the authors neurotic moments while travelling from one imperfect setting after another in rural china was captivating. Sit down, and read this book with patience.

Rating:
Summary: meaning???
Review: This book is hard to review. For one, it's long and surreal, with the narrator undergoing rapid mitosis, and steeped in metaphor and mysticism.

It starts simply enough, with our narrator looking for a route up to Lingshan (a place more of an ideal than an actual location). As he goes on his quest, it (might) begin to get confusing. There are several interpretations.

He could be alone. Because of that, he invents "you" and "she", among others, whom he talks to. Then there are stories interwoven as we go through his quest, about the people he meets, the history of the villages (that are never named), and the hopes and dreams of different characters. It's like having disembodied voices, and sometimes, it's so personal one feels like a voyeur. Other times, it's so cut off, one gets conscious of a feeling of...isolation, and can almost feel his breath on the back of the neck.

So no, it's not an easy book to wade through, but sometimes, I felt like I was rather flying over it.

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's New Clothes
Review: Chinese Literature should have taken great pride in having finally won its first Nobel Prize last year. However, instead of applauding, Chinese writers (both in and out of China) were at first shocked when the winner was announced, then hurried to get the only two novels by Gao Xingjian, which the Taiwan publisher rushed to reprint after initial print runs failed to inspire the public's imagination.

Reading the two novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, which the Swedish Academy highly praised and principally based their award on, turned out to be not only a disappointing but also an insulting experience. Soul Mountain is by no means a novel, let alone a good one.

I have read the reviews in both the English and Chinese media and found that no one has given a clear brief of the book. Nobody really can. For it is a horrendously heaped hodgepodge of travel notes combing chaotic choreography, superficial legends, sinister folklore, fragmentary historical events, random thoughts, hazy memories, artificial feelings, scrappy jottings, ethnic customs, fake fables, folk songs, parodies of ancient Chinese novels, trivial and totally irrelevant encounters, shallow political and literary comments, pseudo-philosophical accounts, and erotic fanatics with monotonous female characters.

One has to admit that it is shrewd to use a modernist-like narrative that instead of giving names to the characters, uses "I," "you," "she" and "he."

In this largely autobiographical book, "`I' travel in the real world," Gao explained in the book and in a lecture at Stockholm University in 1991. "`You' are an imagined `I' who wanders in a fantasized spiritual world, `She,' then is the derivative of the lonely You," he said.

"The dissolution of `She' caused the alienation of `I,'" the author enigmatically rigmaroled in the lecture, "then emerges `He.'"

"All this is better understood when not closely examined," wrote Richard Eder in a review in The New York Times. He is right, because neither Gao's eloquent lecture nor his characters can withstand any close examination.

Occasionally (in two chapters toward the end), when the author becomes too eager to make comments about himself, his work or some phony philosophical thoughts, he finds it sounds awkward to use "I" or "You" as narrator, so he shifts to "He."

After closing this 500-plus-page bogus book, one is guaranteed to remember no characters, no storyline, no details and no beautiful prose. And forget about the stream of consciousness one might expect from a modernist novel, for the book is almost entirely devoid of psychological probes. To sum it up, one will not grab anything at all from reading the book and will become more baffled than ever about anything Chinese. Readers will not feel in the least the philosophical approach Gao explained in his lectures and his English translator parroted in the introduction, that Soul Mountain is about an individual's struggle between resisting collective forces and longing for community warmth.

I can almost see how desperately some reviewers tried to find something philosophical, something beautiful or something quotable in the book, so they would be able to lift the Nobel-winning book up to a certain level. Unfortunately, finding nothing by the end, some went with the English translator's introduction.

So far, the translator, Mabel Lee, has taken most of the blame for the book's coarseness and obscurity. This writer certainly has no intention of glorifying Lee's translation, for mistakes and inaccuracies could easily be picked here and there throughout the book (well, if the whole book is nonsense, why can't a translator add a little more?). What must be pointed out is that Gao's original is as dreadful as the English translation, if not worse. Grammatical blunders and misused characters can be easily found throughout the Chinese text. Who said Gao is a Chinese language master? Only the Swedish Academy, certainly nobody Chinese. It would invite ridicule for any Chinese person to praise Gao. The language, as well as the content, in his second novel, One Man's Bible, was reduced to such a level that many Chinese writers can find no other word but "trash" to describe it.

The fact that Gao's books were consigned to oblivion immediately after they were released to bookstores in Taiwan (before their author won the Nobel) was not because they were too avant-garde for the general reading public to understand, but because of their awful quality. The adulation around him now is for his crown and political purpose only.

Nothing better describes what Soul Mountain is than Hans Andersen's fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. This writer simply has to say out loud that the "Chinese emperor" is indeed naked!

I certainly have not read all Nobel laureates¡¯ works, but I believe there could be no greater scandal than this one in the Nobel literature prize's history. With the generous intention of honoring Chinese writers, the Swedish Academy has instead played a big joke on international society and Chinese people everywhere. I have no doubt that the Nobel committee will bitterly regret their blunder before they begin trying to select the next winner. (February 2, 2001)

Rating:
Summary: Gao was not unknown in China
Review: I wasn't going to write a review but I thought the following statement in Luis C. Chin's review is quite misleading:"Gao Xingjiang is not representative of Chinese Literature and was an obscure and unknown writer not only in China ... but also in the West."

I left China in late 80's. At that time Gao Xingjian was aleady well known among mainland Chinese writers, I was one of them. His fame then was mainly due to his experimental plays.

I just want to say that a reviewer should base his/her statements on facts, not on one's own self created myths. Also, the value of a literary work should not depend on the author's fame.

I read the Chinese version of "Soul Mountain" and enjoyed it. But I can't comment on the English version which I have not read.

Rating:
Summary: Dizzying and Fascinating
Review: I can't speak a word of Chinese, so I can't comment on the translation. The book itself is a sprawling, meandering trek through the mind of the author. It jumps from location to location, alternating travel-log accounts of his journey to Soul Mountain and long stories he makes up and tells to the various people he meets along the way. It is often hard to know whether the story you are reading is "real" or not, but that isn't the point. Modern and ancient China will come alive for you, in all its complexity and strangeness. The books locales and atmosphere will linger long after you've turned the last page. Be warned, though, the book is longer than it looks.