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Gao Xingjian - Lingshan (Soul Mountain)
I just finished this today. Very interesting book, but I think I probably shouldn't be posting about it until I've had more time to let it sink in. Oh well, I'm killing time.
This is a Chinese writer who now lives in France and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. His works are banned in China. In the eighties, while still in China, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and was told he only had a brief time left to live. A little while later, they found that their initial diagnosis was wrong, and that he was in good health. This experience, and the growing political dislike of his work, inspired him to travel through China for several years; these travels are the basis for the novel. It is many things, I suppose. I mean, I think he purposely indulges his desire to examine a great many topics, some at length and some almost frustratingly briefly. But it is predominantly his reflection on the self, which understandably would be on his mind with his encounter with mortality and the political climate of China and the collective reaction to his work. He is someone who feels the need, constantly, to express himself artistically, and he found himself in a place where you could be imprisoned for writing things that were only vaguely, possibly, slightly, anti-Communist. He pursues the goal of adequately translating one person's experience to another person through experiments in language. The first half of the book, or so, alternates between chapters written in the first and second person perspectives. It's an interesting device: the first chapter starts with "you" meeting someone on a train, and they begin by mirroring each other's movements, seemingly naturally, like people sometimes do, for instance, when trying to pass each other, and this starts a dialogue between them. So we have him looking in a mirror, and then embodying this "you" as the protagonist for half the novel. He also examines his need for companionship, and his reflections on both the failures of long-term relationships and his rejection of solitude. It's not quite an easy read. They were a couple of points where I understood why my mother had put it aside. But I do think it's worth it. It is, of course, also interesting (to me, anyway) as a cultural study. I think it is probably the only contempary Chinese work I've read.
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