A review by dukegregory
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

2.0

This book is a five-hundred page representation of the grand platitude, "The journey is greater than the destination," a claim that any novel explores on a certain level. But wow wow wow the journey here is made up of eighty-two faux-destinations. Every chapter is its own concept, its own town, its own legend, its own country gazette, its own folk song, its own dream, its own memory, everything being amorphous in a manner that seems implausible due to the clarity that the minimalist prose affords. The first two-hundred pages were interesting to me because of the unorthodox structure, if a complete lack of structure can even be referred to as "unorthodox." There are three major characters: I, you, and she, three characters that are refractions of I's self. This is outlined explicitly for the reader around chapter fifty-two (which is not really a shocking tactic: explicit explanation, for Xingjian when he begins to make comments about the form of the novel within the novel, the hodgepodge nature becoming acknowledged diegetically), and reading it felt like pseudo-psychological games, like Xingjian has outed himself as penning a novel that is utter navel-gazing for so many pages, but he, instead of playing into the pretension, calls it out to show that he is in on the pretension. He almost makes it ridiculous. The dilemma here is that the book is lengthy, yet a throughline of any kind is nonexistent. This is beyond not knowing how to get from Point A to Point B. This is a situation during which you move from chapter to chapter having no concept of where the narrators will be or what they are doing there except for the vague expedition. Sometimes Xingjian offers specific monuments, relics, historical references, ethnic group names, etc. which allowed me to look at a map and restore some semblance of mental order, but many times he simply places you into a recollection of a folk tale, or the narrator argues with she, or whatever the hell we go through. Which, what the hell DID I go through? I enjoyed quite a bit: discussions of the traditions of China's ethnic minorities to the South, a subtle portrayal of the Cultural Revolution's echoes in the late twentieth-century in major metropolises and the farthest reaches of rural communities, and a dreamlike representation of loneliness and a search for one man's self within his own being as well as in the context of a grander culture that is constantly shifting around him. He seeks an authentic form of living through an introspective sense of self while realizing the beautiful necessity of community. But it's all so messy and incomprehensible. I was able to read this so quickly because of the diction, a style that finds its beauty in clarity, in its own unique notion of transcendentalist modernism. I also just cannot excuse Xingjian's use of women. I say use, because so many women in the tales told are raped or attacked in some way, and the only major female character, she, is a sexual object, a woman tethered to you through Xingjian's narrative trick. She is tortured by a vague past and can't really find reprieve in the version of the narrator with whom she is associated. It's all just so banal and yet beautiful and yet so insightful into certain cultural traits that only the outskirts of China beholds and yet it is so utterly begging for an edit and yet it had moments of spiritual heft and yet it feels supremely nihilistic at times and yet I can't stop thinking about this dumpster fire and yet. And yet it's only worth two-stars and a healthy bout of introspection no matter how performative.