Gao Xingjian Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

Critical Review by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

SOURCE: Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. Review of Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian. Review of Contemporary Fiction 21, no. 2 (summer 2001): 161.

In the following review, Twitchell-Waas asserts that the primary achievement of Soul Mountain is Gao's experimental use of narrative voice throughout the novel.

Although last year Gao Xingjian became China's first Nobel laureate (much to the annoyance of Beijing), until very recently little of this remarkable dramatist and fiction writer's work has appeared in English. The first of Gao's two big novels, Soul Mountain is an autobiographical, highly episodic epic that follows the protagonist's wanderings throughout much of southwest China, driven both by the desire to escape official persecution back in Beijing and the search for renewed spiritual grounding. This vast remote region of China—with its primeval forests, diverse minority nationalities, and remnants of authentic Buddhism and Taoism—has long represented a reservoir of oppositional cultural traditions against the dominant Han...
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