Soul Mountain

In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent 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 journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Mountain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self. Overview: NOBEL Prize of Literature GAO XINGJIAN (whose name is pronounced gow shing-jen) is a playwright and celebrated painter as well as a fiction writer and critic. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he studied in state schools, earned a university degree in French in Beijing, and embarked on a life of letters. Choosing exile in 1987, he settled in Paris, where he completed Soul Mountain two years later. In 1992 he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.