It is this necessary approach even for a Chinese writer living outside his homeland ,just as Spanish and Latin American writers living outwith the past , cannot directly pass comment on the previous which makes some criticism of the Book being a fragmented jumble of memory that never crystallises into a coherent narrative a little unfair.
In saying all this the Book does not really have a "soul" of its own that captures the reader with a vision for a better alternative , more it comes across as a sad lament of a man who himself has lost touch with his inner soul.
This review by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF for the New York Times gives a fair assessment of the Novel
"Back to the question, though, of what ''Soul Mountain'' is about: every reader might answer the question differently, but to me at least it was ultimately less a travelogue than a searching account of an individual's ramblings to himself as he bounced between the oppression of the group and the oppression of loneliness. Escape from the collective is a particularly resonant theme for Chinese intellectuals like Gao, for status and power have always been conferred on Chinese scholars by the state -- typically a repressive one.
The Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 reminded intellectuals, if they needed any such reminder, that the group could turn on them suddenly and ferociously. In those years, teachers and officials would abruptly find themselves paraded in front of a mob and forced to bend down, arms twisted painfully behind their backs, as their colleagues, friends, children and even spouses stepped up to denounce them as spies, counterrevolutionaries or ''stinking'' reactionaries. Those struggle sessions subsided after 1976 but left many people with an enduring fear of political campaigns and mob rule. Perhaps it is not surprising that Gao is drawn to Taoist recluses in the mountains"
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