Soul Mountain

. A national bestseller. Author, Gao Xingjian. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Perennial, an Imprint of Harper Collins publishers. First Perennial edition published 2001. Gao Xingjian was born on 4 January 1940 in war torn China soon after the beginning of the Japanese invasion. He completed secondary and tertiary studies in the People's Republic of China (established in 1949 after the Communist victory in the civil war against the Nationalists), graduating with a major in French from the Beijing Foreigh Languages Institute in 1962. Soul Mountain is a literary response to the devastation of the self of the individual by the primitive human urge for the warmth and security of an other, or others, in other words by socialized life. The existence of an other resolves the problem of lonelliness but brings with it anxieties for the individual, for inherent in any relationship is, inevitably, some form of power struggle." This is a very good book and quite interesting to read. The spine is tight and straight, the pages are free of markings. "In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter, Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminment death. But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer, he had won a reprieve from death. Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a jorney 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in Southwest China." **