Soul Mountain

A writer is misdiagnosed with lung cancer and takes it as permission to disappear into rural China — the mountains, the rivers, the villages where the old ways still exist, the people who have been left behind by modernization. Gao Xingjian writes in shifting pronouns — I, you, he, she — so that the narrator keeps splitting and reforming. A dispatch from inside China's interior landscape, both geographical and psychological. Won the Nobel Prize in 2000. Banned in China. The most interior Chinese dispatch on this shelf — not history or politics but a man trying to find something in the silence that the city had covered over.