[In the following review, Jenner argues that Soul Mountain is a book about a male mid-life crisis and criticizes the English translation of the novel, noting the “clumsiness of expression in virtually every paragraph.”]

So you are climbing this mountain—which mountain?—almost any mountain in central or southwest China—searching for you don't quite know what. Or perhaps you are wandering around the streets of country towns, drawn by the ambiance folklorique. Sometimes you are catching up on a spot of archaeology and ruminating on neolithic pottery spindle whorls (or spinning wheels, as your translator so quaintly renders them). Or again, you might be talking to friends. You press-gang your reader into being a character in some parts of the book [Soul Mountain] by addressing him (and it evidently is him) as “you” and telling him what he is doing in the middle of the action. This allows the reviewer to “you” the author.

When you are not staggering up the misty wooded slopes or seeking the truth from sages, you occasionally like to involve your reader in a sex scene. Every few chapters you drag us poor embarrassed things into these second-person bouts with anonymous women, all desperate for your favours as you go through your prolonged mid-life crisis. Sorry about the cliché, but if ever there was a mid-life crisis, this is its book.

It was some time after 1980, and you had passed forty. As you tell it here, you had psyched yourself up to cope with a diagnosis of the lung cancer that killed your father, only to have the disease miraculously disappear. This was when the thought police were trying their hardest to take back the little spaces that some state-owned publishers had used to publish truer and more interesting things in the late 1970s. You had already made a splash with your absurdist short play Bus Stop, a touch of Beckett about people waiting, not for Godot but for a bus (successful state socialism, perhaps) that never comes. You were now unpublishable, and the cops may have been after you. So it was time to head for the hills. Presumably this book comes from your long journey from the mountains of the southwest to the sea. You are much too knowing to have written it straight as a novel, or a travelogue, or a diary, and too modern to have imprisoned yourself within a coherent narrative. Besides, it is fun playing transgressive and teasing the reader. You give yourself permission to pile up a jumbled heap of eighty-one chapters. You can even have a “critic” near the end tell the writer (another switch of person) that the book breaks all the rules. This gives you/him the cue to write an unpunctuated page of unconnected ramblings. You finish the book with a small green frog that you just happen to know is God looking in at you through the window, and tell your readers you don't understand anything.

If they choose to read the book, they have asked for what they get. It is amiably self-indulgent, and fun in places if one can keep going through the longueurs and forget about the language. At least it isn't too obviously in the dominant tradition of twentieth-century Chinese writing that tries to do the reader good and save the nation. Or is it really out to improve us? Take the eighty-one chapters, for example. That is not just nine times nine, which would be Oriental enough. It is also the same number of chapters as in the received text of the Dao de jing. Doesn't that suggest earnest seeking after the timeless wisdom of the East? Probably you are a little inclined that way. You enjoy sounding off about Chinese cultures, ancient and modern. You go to find people who live not in the world of politics and money, but in Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples, isolated huts lost in the mountains. You do your Yangtze Valley version of Synge on the Aran Islands, looking for the lost authenticities of dying traditions.

Your Swedish translator must have done a good job on your book to persuade his fellow members of the Nobel Academy to give you the big prize. It is a pity about this well-intentioned English version, which clumps along in hobnailed boots. I haven't read the book you wrote, Lingshan, only this translated Soul Mountain. The problem with the English is not so much the occasional howler—we translators all make those from time to time—but the clumsiness of expression in virtually every paragraph. For that if for no other reason, this is a book best read fast.