Soul Mountain (Paperback)

If a fiction writer could know the true stories of the people he passes on the street, then he would be amazed. This is a bold, lyrical, prodigious novel, which probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candour. Interwoven with the myriad of stories and countless memorable characters, from venerable Daosit 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.

Fleeing the social conformity required by the Communist government, he wanders deep into the regions of the Qiang, Miago, and Yi peoples located on the fringes of Han Chinese civilisation and discovers a plethora of different traditions, history, legends, folk songs, and landscapes. Slowly, with the help of memory, imagination, and sensory experience, he reconstructs his personal past. He laments the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the ecology, both human and physical, of China. And in a polyphony of narrating selves, the narrator's "I" spawns a "you," a "she," and a "he," each with a distinct perspective and voice, the novel delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.

Storytelling saves the narrator from a deep loneliness that is part of the human condition. His search for meaning, in life, in the journey, turns up the possibility that there may be no meaning. The elusive Lingshan "Soul Mountain," which becomes the object of his quest, never yields up its secrets, but the journey is a rich, strange, provocative, and rewarding one. This is truly a novel of immense wisdom and profound beauty.

To talk content, this is one man's journey around China in exile, having been forced to rome the expansive lands of his home nation to avoid arrest from the communist police that take a distaste to "Spiritual Pollution", or free expression and creativity that is deemed in opposition to the Maoist regime. To call it a "travelogue", however, would be misleading - to use a cliche, it is as much a journey into the author's soul and psyche as a more literal journey. The pronouns used in reference to the author change, usually, with each chapter - usually alternating between "I" and "You" for the first half of the novel, and then later also breaking into "He" (he apparently does this to distance himself from certain aspects of his personality, as if both he and the reader are looking down on himself from above - and also because he is lonely). I personally enjoyed the "you" sections the most, as they are the more personal accounts of a relationship between the author and an unnamed woman (referred to as "she").

Ignore reviews that talk about it being too experimental - if no-one experiments, how can literature move forward? Also ignore comments that it is too hard to read - there is no real cohesion, and this may be confusing, but never hard - I never experienced the apathy I have with books that I consider hard going, such as Heller's "Catch 22". Read this book for the comforting, zen-like narrative that you will experience if you truly let yourself go with this book. Don't try to analyse or scrutinise it (the author often does that himself, anyway), and just enjoy this book for what it is: an autobiographical masterpiece from a truly deserving Nobel Prize winner.