Soul Mountain is by no means a novel, let alone a good one. I have read the reviews in both the English and Chinese media and found that no one has given a clear brief of the book.
Nobody really can.
For it is a horrendously heaped hodgepodge of travel notes combing chaotic choreography, superficial legends, sinister folklore, fragmentary historical events, random thoughts, hazy memories, artificial feelings, scrappy jottings, ethnic customs, fake fables, folk songs, parodies of ancient Chinese novels, trivial and totally irrelevant encounters, shallow political and literary comments, pseudo-philosophical accounts, and erotic fanatics with monotonous female characters. He is right, because neither Gao's eloquent lecture nor his characters can withstand any close examination. And forget about the stream of consciousness one might expect from a modernist novel, for the book is almost entirely devoid of psychological probes. To sum it up, one will not grab anything at all from reading the book and will become more baffled than ever about anything Chinese. Readers will not understand in the least the philosophical approach Gao explained in his lectures and his English translator parroted in the introduction, that Soul Mountain is about an individual's struggle between resisting collective forces and longing for community warmth.