Soul Mountain

"[A] brilliant, maddening sprawl of a novel....The Chinese communist censors were right to worry about Gao when they banned his work nearly 20 years ago: In this book, as in his earlier writings, he not only exposes the abuses of communism; he questions whether a soul bitten by a communist loneliness can ever be whole again....Make no mistake: This is no easy book, no Voltairean escapade with charming side stories that reveal a colorful land and its people. Gao means the reader to work hard, juggle the myriad components, follow his contrapuntal sequences, puzzle through the conundrums...[but] if a successful novelist is one who tells us something new about the human spirit and a successful novel transports us to another world, then Gao and SOUL MOUNTAIN have succeeded spectacularly."Gao, Xingjian is the author of 'Soul Mountain', published 2001 under ISBN 9780060936235 and ISBN 0060936231.