SOURCE: Review of Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian. Virginia Quarterly Review 77, no. 3 (summer 2001): 98.

In the following review, the critic contends that Gao's narrative structure in Soul Mountain requires patience on the part of the reader and that the novel may not hold the attention of readers looking for a conventional storyline.

Soul Mountain, the 2000 Nobel Prize winner in literature, requires its readers to have patience. Patience, for example, to believe that the short, episodic chapters are leading toward a cohesive whole. Patience, to wait for a narrator split into four personal pronouns—I, you, he, and she—to deliver a comprehensible story. Though story, at least in the sense of most contemporary novels, is not what Xingjian is attempting in this book. Instead, he cobbles together a mix of folklore, character sketches, and snapshots of the rural Chinese countryside to create a modernist mosaic. The result is half-memoir...