Soul Mountain
Told he has lung cancer and then told he has not, a writer under political surveillance leaves Beijing for the forests and river valleys of the south-west, asking after a mountain that may not be there. Eighty-one chapters alternate between an I who travels and a you who is imagined travelling, gathering Qiang and Miao songs, Daoist hermits, village murders and the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution. Written across seven years and published in Taipei, it is the work most often cited when Gao became the first Chinese-language Nobel laureate.
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Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Quest object (Greimas)
Symbol / motif
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 51% · 14 shared
- 47% · 11 shared
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- 44% · 13 shared
- 44% · 13 shared