Soul Mountain was written by a Chinese novelist, translator, playwright, director, critic and artist Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain was a beautiful book and a portrait of physical and spiritual journeys. It's not a light book. The first part of the book is quite engaging and entertaining, but the second part of the book is dense and confusing. Overall it's a sort of book that takes a year to read. Soul Mountain is a novel but it has all these things that a novel shouldn't have. Gao already knew that this unconventional style of writing fiction would arouse objections from general readers, which is why he included a short chapter on what counts as fiction. It is an autobiographical work in which Gao portrays his seven-year journey, which is both physical and spiritual. Gao Xingjian began writing this novel in Communist China in 1982 and finished it in Paris in 1989. During the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, he was a famous writer in China but the Communist government did not allow his works to be published. Chinese government authorities viewed him as a man whose ideas leaned toward the capitalist West. At that time Gao discovered that he had lung cancer. It was the wrong diagnosis but it had affected him irrevocably. He fled Beijing and traveled through southwestern China for ten months. In this novel Gao symbolically portrays his search for himself through the search for Soul Mountain. In this research, he encountered different experiences. He met Chinese ethnic minorities and documented their traditions and customs. He visits temples and forests, but his fundamental desire remains the company of humans. The plot of the novel is the author's search for a mythical S...... middle of paper ......ssey.When this novel was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Chinese Foreign Minister stated that this award is nothing more than a political maneuver and therefore the Chinese nation is not proud of it. Chinese Communist Party-line literati have wondered whether the author and the novel are Nobel material or not. Fortunately, Goran Malmqvist, who translated Gao's works and produced them for Stockholm, is an expert on China and also one of the members of the academy that selects Nobel Prizes, so he paved the way for Gao Xingjian to get his Nobel Prize. .Works CitedChampeon, Kenneth, Mountain Del Soul, ThingsAsian, 5 February 2002, http://kenneth.champeon.com/mountain.htmlFreeman, John, Dissident Writes a 'Walden', Asian Style, http://63.147. 65.175/books/soulmt1217.htmXingjian, Gao, Soul Mountain, Harper Collins, November 2001