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Gao Xingjian: Soul Mountain
I remember attempting to read this one a few years ago; at the time, I disliked it rather severely, which was probably to be expected considering that it is a rather tangled book, and I was twelve at the time. It's rather more interesting to me now - very strange, very cerebral, very post-modern (and this is the literary opinion of a fifteen-year-old with no qualifications or indeed skill in English, and should therefore be discounted completely).
I still can't quite decide what the author's trying to get across, although on balance he probably isn't, and it really doesn't matter; not sure if it will ever be a book I love, but it's terribly interesting and some of the descriptive parts are gorgeous - there are an enormous number of details, even down to the crease in someone's shirt, and it makes for extremely enjoyable (if slightly unsettling, after a point) reading,
(My experience of it was probably marred a tad by the fact that circumstance forced me to review it for English class, but the same could be said of any book about which one is forced to write great scads of woefully pretentious ramble in order to impress one's English teacher.)
"...Reality can't be verified and doesn't need to be, that can be left for the reality-of-life experts to debate. What is important is life. Reality is simply that I am sitting by the fire in this room which is black with grime and smoke and that I see the light of the fire dancing in his eyes. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person. All that needs to be said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a haze, and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream."
"You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures."
"...The snow has covered all the details, but the tracks which have been walked on after the snow look like veins. An inconsequential snow scene like this creates images in my mind, induces in me a desire to enter it. By entering the snow scene I would have become the back of someone. This back of course would not have any particular meaning if I were not at this window looking at it. Gloomy sky, snow-covered ground brighter than the sky, no mynas and sparrows. Snow absorbing thought and meaning."
