[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 Confucianism, of which it is implied that communism is just another version. Posing as an ethnographer collecting vestiges of folk rituals and songs, the protagonist searches randomly for epiphanic moments, yet never deludes himself that these tribal or religious orders of life offer him a personal solution—if nothing else, he is too fiercely individualistic and this-worldly. Within this loose, perhaps all-too-familiar narrative structure lies the real interest and achievement of the novel. Alternating chapters switch between the protagonist's first-person account of his ramblings and a second-person narrative that apparently is his internalized dialogues and monologues addressed to himself. On both narrative levels, or trajectories, an enormous range of stories are recounted. There are many dozens of them, and all kinds—travel incidents, made-up tales, recollections, folk stories, myths, parables, dreams—as if the novel is attempting to manifest the release of repressed narratives as resources for personal and cultural renewal. However, although there are moments when the protagonist achieves a sense of nonteleological oneness, or Taoist emptying, Lingshan (Spirit or Soul Mountain) remains, as in the famous Buddhist parable Gao frequently alludes to, on the other shore. Both thematically and formally, Soul Mountain hovers between mere randomness and the prototypical meaningfulness of the unfolding search itself.