Soul Mountain
Gao Xingjian
Read May-June 2008
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, White Bear Lake branch
Essay written Friday, August 1st, 2008
Let's compare Soul Mountain to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain: both have "Mountain" in the title (in the English translation, anyway); both were written by Nobel Prize for Literature winning authors; both were written in languages that are not mine (I speak English, SM was written in Chinese, MM was written in German); and both are terribly thick.
Compelling. Gorgeous. If I understood even a little bit about Chinese culture and history (and there is a ton to know), this would have been even more powerful to me. As it was, I felt like a lot of things were going over my head.
But that was forgivable. I take the blame. Soul Mountain is teeming with wonderful imagery, glorious dialogue, innovative narration, fantastic weirdness. Moving. So much so that I really can't do justice to it by continuing to fail to describe it.
This so far is the only Chinese book I've ever read, and I'm afraid it's all downhill from here. In fact, I think if in a few years I want to revisit the literature of China, I may just come back to Soul Mountain.
It read amazingly fast, for such a long book. 500+ pages, but it rarely dragged. Ten or twenty pages could go by in a flash, it was so compelling. Again, it was very confusing to me and I didn't understand at all who was I, me, she, he, and I believe that was the point. Disconcertingly confusing, and I don't think I was prepared for it, or willing to put the work into getting the deeper associations out of it. Nevertheless, wait a page or two if you're lost, it won't matter, there will be something extraordinarily beautiful coming along any moment now.
I read this over the course of five or six weeks, at only ten or so pages per day usually. I finished it at about six o'clock on the 20th of June, an hour before the Summer Solstice local time. The last non-short-story fiction to be read by me until the Autumnal Equinox.
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