This collection of recent plays by Gao Xingjian is worth investigating by merit of the dramatist's receipt of the Nobel Prize and for the controversy raging around him and the Prize in China. Most readers will probably pick up this book for those very reasons. The plays contained are post-modern, avant-garde, and in some cases utterly abstract. They're the sort of scripts that probably make for very interesting plays when performed, but make for rather tedius reading. Some scripts make for very enjoyable literature, but Gao's are a little too "artsy" to work in print alone. I recommend "The Other Shore" for serious readers only: dramatists, academics, and the hardcore Chinese literature enthusiast. Casual readers, merely curious about this year's Nobel winner, should avoid this collection and instead read Gao's novel, "Soul Mountain", which is much more accessible.

Gao Xingjian's artistic sensibility was chiselled out of his double frustration of public condemnation and private shock.

After being established as a prominent Chinese playwright, he suddenly fell out of grace of the communist authorities, who dubbed his works as `Spiritual Pollution'. At that time he was also undergoing an intense personal trauma, being diagnosed, wrongly, with lung cancer. He set out on an extensive journey to the heart of China covering 5 months and 15,000 kilometres which helped him rediscover his self and his countrymen and helped change his world-view.

Although a direct outcome of this emotional journey was the phantasmogoric novel `Soul Mountain', the present five plays also bear testimony to his broadened horizon.

In his plays the mythical finds place with the real, as he tries to make sense of the diversity of his land's culture and its people. Gao tries to mask the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in a set of highly original imagery. The symbolism sometimes obfuscates the proceedings, but the stark realism of the human drama comes back again and again. Some of Gao's views, on man woman relationship for instance, may not be palatable to the Western sensibility, but one has to understand the vast compass that he is handling in these plays.

Out of the five plays `The Other Shore' and `Nocturnal Wanderer' are the most gripping. But all the five plays reflect the yearning of the individual to break lose from the stifling collective memory.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000 goes to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian

"for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama".

In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses. He is a perspicacious sceptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.

His great novel Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves. It is based on impressions from journeys in remote districts in southern and south-western China, where shamanistic customs still linger on, where ballads and tall stories about bandits are recounted as the truth and where it is possible to come across exponents of age-old Daoist wisdom. The book is a tapestry of narratives with several protagonists who reflect each other and may represent aspects of one and the same ego. With his unrestrained use of personal pronouns Gao creates lightning shifts of perspective and compels the reader to question all confidences. This approach derives from his dramas, which often require actors to assume a role and at the same time describe it from the outside. I, you and he/she become the names of fluctuating inner distances.

Soul Mountain is a novel of a pilgrimage made by the protagonist to himself and a journey along the reflective surface that divides fiction from life, imagination from memory. The discussion of the problem of knowledge increasingly takes the form of a rehearsal of freedom from goals and meaning. Through its polyphony, its blend of genres and the scrutiny that the act of writing subjects itself to, the book recalls German Romanticism's magnificent concept of a universal poetry.

Gao Xingjian's second novel, One Man's Bible, fulfils the themes of Soul Mountain but is easier to grasp. The core of the book involves settling the score with the terrifying insanity that is usually referred to as China's Cultural Revolution. With ruthless candour the author accounts for his experiences as a political activist, victim and outside observer, one after the other. His description could have resulted in the dissident's embodiment of morality but he rejects this stance and refuses to redeem anyone else. Gao Xingjian's writing is free of any kind of complaisance, even to good will. His play Fugitives irritated the democracy movement just as much as those in power.

Gao Xingjian points out himself the significance for his plays of the non-naturalistic trends in Western drama, naming Artaud, Brecht, Beckett and Kantor. However, it has been equally important for him to "open the flow of sources from popular drama". When he created a Chinese oral theatre, he adopted elements from ancient masked drama, shadow plays and the dancing, singing and drumming traditions. He has embraced the possibility of moving freely in time and space on the stage with the help of one single gesture or word - as in Chinese opera. The uninhibited mutations and grotesque symbolic language of dreams interrupt the distinct images of contemporary humanity. Erotic themes give his texts feverish excitement, and many of them have the choreography of seduction as their basic pattern. In this way he is one of the few male writers who gives the same weight to the truth of women as to his own.

The Swedish Academy

I found Soul Mountain to be one of those unique works of literature that immediately identifies itself as great for inexplicable reasons. I cannot compare this book to any other, either in terms of narrative sytle or content. Nonetheless, it is one of the most meaningful reflective texts I have read. It is about the author's journey of self-discovery, but along the way, you may have your own.

Given a reprieve from death when his diagnosis of lung cancer is rescinded and forced to leave Beijing due to threats of political imprisonment, the autobiographical narrator I travels throughout interior China documenting traditional folk songs and seeking a state of being in which he can give free rein to his artistic expression. In a series of unconnected episodes, I tells of his encounters with forest rangers, Buddhist and Daoist monastics, government workers, keepers of the traditions of ethnic minorities, and his own childhood memories. As he tells these stories, I decries the destruction of traditional culture for the sake of "progress" under the Communist regime but mourns the weight culture places on individual freedom. I longs to return to a wild, primal state but is rebuffed by the callous indifference of raw nature. I's story is that of trying to reconcile these conflicting ideas of what it is good for the self to become.

Interleaved with I's story is the story of you, who in metaphor with I's own journey, is traveling to the mythical mountain Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Early in his journey, you gains a traveling companion, she. The interaction between you and she becomes frightening portrayal of how men and women can trap each other in a relationship neither wants, and how easy it is to do so. Eventually you frees himself of she and resumes his journey to Lingshan, but his experiences are not again the same.

Experimental fiction always walks a fine line between narrating in an unorthodox way that is nonetheless perfect for telling the particular story being told and narrating in a way that is such a distortion of traditional narrative that the reader cannot follow. It took me a few (short) chapters to acclimate myself to the interplay between pronouns, to Gao's storytelling mode that is half travelogue and half metaphor, but once acquainted with it, I found it unique but very readable. The story is almost its own tutor in how to read it. There's a point about 300 pages in where both I's and you's stories undergo major changes, and the narrative style here changes a bit too, and I was lost again for a few chapters. This is unfortunate because I felt this section of the book was one of the most important and I missed a lot here, but even a re-read didn't help. The vast majority of the book though, is very lucid.

Gao's prose defies adjectives. It is haunting, multilayered, deeply symbolic, almost a mirror of the self. I've placed this book in my stack of things to read again in ten years, books that become reflections of one's own experience and should be re-read to see what new insights appear as that experience changes.

Soul Mountain is a mountainous, momentous book. It is beautifully and evocative, a portrait of journeys both physical and spiritual. It is also a very tiring read, and is a chore to get through.

The first third of this monstrously long tome is engaging and enjoyable, but the second third is dense, rambling, and confusing. I haven't managed to read past this point, but apparently things pick up at the end. This is not beach reading. This is the sort of book that you take a year on, reading a chapter a week.

The "plot", if you can call it that, of Soul Mountain is well known already. It is significant in that Gao wrote it mainly for his own benefit, and as such is less carefully constructed than his plays and other novels.

Soul Mountain's many unusual literary devices work very cleverly in the original Chinese, but are awkward in the translation. This is not to blame the translator, who did a brave job of a daunting task, as it's a matter of linguistic discrepancy. The book is so rife with folklore and obscure cultural and literary references that it will through even the most seasonsed China Hand, not to mention baffle the average reader.

My friends who read this book in the original Chinese had much higher praise for it than I could muster, and apparently Gao's other novels are less existencial and far more enjoyable. There is an unfortunate paucity of Gao's works in English. The only other option, The Other Shore, a collection of his later plays, contains only a sampling of his later, more abstract works. Early scripts, such as Bus Stop, which first established his reputation and revolutionized theater in China, are unfortunately unavailable in English. Only as more translations become available will English readers become aware of the scope of Gao's talent and why he is so deserving of the Nobel.

I thought Soul Mountain was one of the most stunning,provocative books I have ever read. It had my total attention from the first paragraph.I found myself periodically closing the book and just staring at the cover, musing to myself,"How did he write this? How brilliant and unique this writing style is." The translation-not speaking Chinese I have no idea if the translation was accurate poetically, emotionally or literally- but if Mabel Lee has made up her own work on Soul Mountain through a poor translation (as some of your reviewers suggested, I say, I can't wait to read more of Mabel Lee.

I have recommended this book to everyone I know and purchased it for scores of people. I consider it to be a brilliant cross-over journeybetween spirit and flesh and China and the West. I have re-read entire sections over and over, and each time enjoy it as much as the first reading.

I eagerly await Gao Xingjian's next book.