[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, half-fiction, an expatriate's re-imagined journey through the Qiang, Miao, and Yi districts—places as much on the fringe of Chinese history as civilization. From biologists studying giant Pandas to Daoist masters and small-town Communist thugs, the people we meet along the way are interesting enough. Still, the interactions are minimal. After all, a traveler who gets involved is only asking for trouble. The question is whether the resulting introspective narration can hold your attention. For those readers with a steady interest in modern China and the psychological isolation of its society, the answer is yes. For those readers with a less precise motivation, who simply want to lose themselves in a story, the answer is otherwise.