Soul Mountain

(Paperback)

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the worldwide bestselling novel by the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature.Soul Mountain is a picaresque novel of immense wisdom and sparse beauty, bursting with knowledge and experience and portraying a culture as vast and fascinating as the history of humankind itself.In China in the early eighties, the book's central character embarks on a cross-country journey in search of the mysterious 'Mountain'. Along the way he collects stories, lovers, spiritual wisdom and undergoes myriad experiences that are sometimes violent, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, but always enriching. He researches the origins of humankind and Chinese culture, and explores philosophical issues such as truth, knowledge and how onechildhood affects later life. At the end of the book, he realises that all along what was important was not finding the elusive Soul Mountain, but rather the journey itself. Part love story, part fable, part philosophical treatise and part travel journal, this is one of the most challenging, rewarding and inventive works of fiction since Ulysses.

Author Bio

Gao Xingjian was born in 1940, in China. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote a number of works of prose, plays and poems, aware that what he wrote could not be published, since they failed to comply with the government's strict guidelines. He was finally able to publish a substantial number of works during the 1980s, but when a ban was imposed on the performance of his play Bus Stop in 1983, Gao finally fled Beijing and began the long journey of a political refugee which forms the basis of Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible. He now lives in Paris, where he writes and paints, and is a French citizen.