SOURCE: Xingjian, Gao, Mabel Lee, and Susan Salter Reynolds. “The World According to Gao.” Los Angeles Times (27 February 2001): E1, E4.

In the following interview, Gao and Lee, the English-language translator of Soul Mountain, discusses the theme of love and male-female relationships in Gao's body of work.

There ought to be a Nobel Prize for readers. Consider the terrible isolation of the reader, for example, turning the pages of Gao Xingjian's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Soul Mountain, a beautiful, confusing, thought-demanding book full of questions and no answers. Whom can you talk to about the self and the soul and the constrictions of culture? Or about the perversions of social will on the pure, animal needs of the individual? On page 506, the loyal reader is told that God is a small green frog on a snowy windowsill in Sichuan province, that conclusions are bogus, the self is elusive and nothing...