Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain

I walk down the slope, following the sound of the drums. A peasant goes by along the embankment with his trouser legs rolled up, his calves covered in mud. A little further on a child is leading a water buffalo on a rope towards a pond near the village. I look at the smoke rising from the chimneys over the rooftops below and a peacefulness rises in my heart (p. 160).

These shoes which I bought for this long trip have been in rain and mud and fully immersed in rivers. They are out of shape, black and dirty, and no-one could imagine that once they had been offered at a high price as fashionable travel shoes (p. 254).

People, in the final analysis, aren't wolves but more like feral dogs (p. 254).

"The true traveller is without goal, it is the absence of goals which creates the ultimate traveller" (p. 277).

You are always searching for your childhood and it's becoming an obsession. Y0u want to visit each of the places you stayed during your childhood, the houses, courtyards, streets and lanes of your memory.

Your home was once upstairs in a small solitary building on a vacant lot with a big pile of rubble at the front: the building that once stood there had been destroyed by a bomb or a fire and had never been rebuilt. Green bristlegrass grew in the rubble and broken walls, and crickets could often be found when the broken tiles and bricks were turned over. There was a very clever type of cricket called Black Satin Cream and when their shiny ink-black wings vibrated they made a clear, resonating sound. There was also another kind called Locust which had a big body and a big mouth and was good at fighting. As a child you had a wonderful time on that rubble heap (p. 325).

"This isn't a novel!"

"Then what is it?" he asks.

"A novel must have a complete story."

He says he has told many stories, some with endings and others without.

"They're all fragments without any sequence, the author doesn't know how to organize connected episodes."

"Then may I ask how a novel is supposed to be organized?"

"You must first foreshadow, build to a climax, then have a conclusion. That's basic common knowledge for writing fiction."

He asks if fiction can be written without conforming to the method which is common knowledge. It would just be like a story, with parts told from beginning to end and parts from end to beginning, parts with a beginning and no ending and others which are only conclusions or fragments which aren't followed up, parts which are developed but aren't completed or which can't be completed or which can be left out or which don't need to be told any further or about which there's nothing more to say. And all of these would be considered stories. (Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain. Transl. Mabel Lee. Harper Perennial, 2001, p. 452. [First published as Lingshan in Twaiwan in 1990 by Lianjing Chuanshe; first US edn. HarperCollins, 2000.])