In June, I managed to meet one of my AC friends – a really fun meeting, even accounting for the fact that we had to catch up on about 8 years of news in two hours. And during the meeting, he recommended me two books. One of them was Soul Mountain.

To be honest, if this wasn’t recommended by my friend, I probably never would have picked it up. Soul Mountain might be by a Nobel Prize in Literature winner, but it’s also the experimental sort of novel that I don’t normally read. Given that I’ve left my literature days long behind me, there was only one thing I could think of: read as fast as I could. I find that if you read fast and try to immerse yourself in the story, you’ll soon get a sense of what’s going on.

Given that I never got more than a sense of what the book was about, I was pretty surprised that I liked quite a few parts. Soul Mountain revolves around three point of views (POVs) – I (first), You (second), and She (third). I and You are looking for the mythical Lingshan (translated to ‘Soul Mountain’). During his search, You runs into She and they begin a toxic relationship.

I’m not going to lie, this book was difficult. The fact that most characters don’t have names (a later chapter actually talks about this) makes it hard to follow along. I was actually very confused about whether this was a novel or a memoir in the beginning and had to turn to Wikipedia. I found that thinking of the POVs as separate characters really helped me in starting to understand, but other reviews (like this one from the Irish Times) seem to think that the POVs are the different facets of one person. The book is sufficiently ambiguous that you could interpret it either way.

Once I got the hang of the possibly different characters, I started to enjoy the book. Gao Xingjian is great when it comes to describing China’s different ethnic minorities and I really enjoyed the travelogue passages in the book. I’ve always heard about how even though the Han Chinese are the majority race, there are many other ethnic minorities, but this is the first book I’ve read that brought the uniqueness of each ethnic group to life. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the people and their folk songs.

I also liked the self-referential nature of the book. The book straight up criticises itself and its different POVs, calling itself “slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own invention, and are calling it fiction”. That is actually really accurate and the self-awareness made me smile. In fact, that chapter ends with “reading this chapter is optional but as you’ve read it you’ve read it”, which made me wonder – is reading the entire book optional too? (of course, I’m not reading this for school. But as I’ve read it, I’ve read it)

That said, I didn’t like the relationship between You and She. Leaving aside the possibility that the two may be the same person, their interactions felt so unrealistic. I kept thinking of the articles about how men can’t really write women in fiction (not all writers, obviously, but some are pretty bad) while writing them because She seemed like a caricature. Add all the misogynistic elements and I really, really didn’t like the relationship between the two of them.

Overall, this could be worth reading if you like literary fiction. It’s not really my cup of tea, but if you’re okay with the shifting POVs and the not-great romantic relationship, there are pretty good travel passages and a startling level of self-awareness in Soul Mountain.