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    Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories
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    Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories
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    Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories

    By Gao Xingjian

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Precisely detailed and delicately suggestive: the best work of Gao’s yet to appear in English translation.”—Kirkus Reviews

    A collection of six exquisite short stories from Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. These beautifully translated stories take as their themes the fragility of love and life, and the haunting power of memory.

    In “The Temple,” the narrator’s acute and mysterious anxiety overshadows the delirious happiness of an outing with his new wife on their honeymoon. In “The Cramp” a man narrowly escapes drowning in the sea, only to find that no one even noticed his absence. In the title story the narrator attempts to relieve his homesickness only to find that he is lost in a labyrinth of childhood memories.

    Everywhere in this collection are powerful psychological portraits of characters whose unarticulated hopes and fears betray the never-ending presence of the past in their present lives.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061871573
    Unavailable
    Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories
    Author

    Gao Xingjian

    Gao Xingjian (whose name is pronounced gow shing-jen) is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he has lived in France since 1987. Gao Xingjian is an artistic innovator, in both the visual arts and literature. He is that rare multitalented artist who excels as novelist, playwright, essayist, director, and painter. In addition to Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, a book of his plays, The Other Shore, and a volume of his paintings, Return to Painting, have been published in the United States.

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    Reviews for Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

    3.5/5

    87 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This collection of six short stories by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian were tied together by their sense of impending doom and loss. "The Temple" is the story of a couple on their honeymoon who impulsively get off the train in a village and hike up to an old temple. There, a man approaches them while ominous music played in my head. Although nothing untoward happened, the story ends with a loose tile hanging overhead about to fall."In the Park" is a conversation between a man and a woman who are meeting after a long separation. There is attraction between them, but the woman is married. Before long the repressed emotions come out as frustrated anger. In the background a woman has clearly been waiting for someone, but when he fails to appear, she bursts into tears."Cramp" begins with a man swimming in the ocean at night. He gets a cramp and worries that he won't make it to shore. Does anyone see him out there? The story ends with a woman on crutches watching two friends swimming."The Accident" begins almost in slow motion, with a man on a bicycle pulling a child in an attached carrier passing in front of a bus. As a crowd gathers around the accident, the language speeds up until all we hear are snippets of conversation. The story ends with the narrator (author?) saying,I have been discussing philosophy again, but life is not philosophy, even if philosophy can derive from knowledge of life. And there is no need to turn life's traffic accidents into statistics, because that's a job for the traffic department or the public security department. Of course, a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can serve as the raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: this would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o'clock, in the central section of Desheng Avenue in front of the radio repair shop.The title story, although it sounds prosaic, is actually a confused narrative that mixes memories with a dream state while a soccer game plays on tv in the background. It's about lost childhoods, lost family, and the drastic changes brought to a village by modernization. "In an Instant" begins with a man in a deck chair looking out at the ocean. But this narrative is broken, with paragraphs about a woman and her sexual proclivities interspersed. Each time the story reverts to the man in the chair, the water is higher, until only the chair is floating. Then it gets weird.
    • 4/5
      In the six pieces translated in this short collection (out of 17 in the original Chinese), author Gao Xingjian experiments with several different ways of conveying a story. Two comments helped me make sense of the stories. The first is a note by the translator, paraphrasing Gao's own postscript to the Chinese collection of his stories: "There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself. More explicit is his proposal that the linguistic art of fiction is 'the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality in writing'". I take this to mean that the stories are intended to move the reader not though the events the story tells, but by the way the story is told. The other key passage ends one of the stories in this collection, the Accident: "Of course a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can serve as raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: this would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o'clock, in the central section of Desheng Avenue in front of the radio repair shop." Of course this story - a moving if just-the-facts narrative - is fiction and therefore a process of creation, echoing the ancient paradox of the lying Cretan (who claims 'everything I say is false'). But more importantly, defining literature as creation misses another side of the art, that of closely observing and interpreting experience, which is what these stories do.The first story, 'the Temple', recounts a spontaneous honeymoon visit to a ruined temple. The plot itself is inconclusive, but the narrator comes increasingly to seem emotionally unreliable. The second story, 'In the Park', conveys the frustration and bitterness of love gone wrong, as former lovers bicker while watching a stranger's heartbreak in progress. 'Cramp' is a study in alienation. The last two stories - 'Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather' and 'In an Instant' - use a stream of consciousness technique. They reminded me of the first (Benjy) section of William Faulkner's Sound and Fury - different scenes interwoven without clear transitions, so the reader must rely on internal clues to piece together the chronological story.
    • 3/5
      I'm not usually a fan of short stories and this collection of translated stories by the Nobel Prize winning author Gao Xingjian reminded me of why that is.I just don't get drawn into short story collections. As soon as I start to get interested, it ends and I'm left trying to get to know a whole new set of characters or to care about an entirely new set of circumstances.Those issues in this book were only exacerbated, for one main reason. These stories, by design, are not plot driven in the slightest. In fact, an afterword contains the following information : "Gao warns readers that his fiction does not set out to tell a story. There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself."As a reader who is more interested in the way a story is told than the actual story, this isn't necessarily a problem.But. It was translated! If the whole point of the work is the use of language, and I can't see that language in the way the author intended, what's the point? I simply don't understand why you'd translate a work that was completely about the writing and not the plot.That said, a few of the stories were interesting. In the Park in particular struck me. It was the story of a couple spending a lazy day together. Nothing exciting happened, there was no passion, no twists. But it sort of gave you a glimpse into these people's lives in a way that felt very intimate and beautiful.Overall though, I can't say that I'd recommend it, considering that I'm not really reading Xingjian's work, but that of his translator.
    • 3/5
      You know, there is nothing more I want than to give this critically well-regarded collection of short stories by Chinese Nobel-laureate Gao Xingjian a glowing review, it would make me feel part of a community who appreciate the best in world literature, which is how I'd like to think of myself. But I have to go with my truthful reaction which is "eh". There are six stories total. The first four (which make up 50% of the books length) are Chekhovian slices of life from 1980s China. "The Cramp" is best, it captures the sense of quiet isolation and terror a handicap person feels surrounded by normal people. It does this by putting a normal person into a temporary handicap position which we can all understand (swimming cramp), and ends the story showing a girl in crutches looking out at her healthy friends in the water while she waits alone, a reversal of perspective. "The Accident" is the most Chekhovian, about a man who is killed in a street accident and we see how events unfold among the townspeople and finally slip away as if nothing had happened. Perhaps a fable of sorts of the Maoist years in China, the baby survived to carry on but the fathers blood has been turned to dust. The last two stories which compose the final half of the book, and provide its title, are in a style or school or writing that I found difficult to understand. There is no plot, sentences seem to exist for emotional impact but do not advance a storyline, sort of stream of conscious. There may be some aspect of 1980s Chinese culture that I am missing in order to appreciate these last two stories.
    • 4/5
      A short book, with stylized Chinese fish on its cover, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather was an intriguing foray into foreign short stories for me. The author is a Nobel prize winner, so I knew at the outset that this wouldn’t be light reading. But the stories are truly fascinating. In the first tale I feel like a fly on the wall, listening to someone speak; is he remembering the past? Is he talking to his family, or to his wife, or to the pictures in his mind? The stories each left me slightly off-balance, not quite sure what I was reading. But the title story, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, suddenly centered me as the narrator looks into memories of his past and finds himself lost in change.The final story, In an Instant, fills most of the second half of the book. It is a beautiful piece, reminding me of a Chinese plate my grandmother had. I don’t remember much about the plate, except that there were blue pictures, a temple and a bridge, trees, and a feeling that the closer I looked at one image the more likely I was to find myself in another. The writing flows in the same way between scenes, adding imagination to each and drawing the reader on with the movement of the prose. There’s no story as such, but there’s reflection and change; it’s oddly mesmerizing, like that moment of falling asleep or of waking up, when objects take on meanings that really belong to something else. It takes much more than an instant to read, and stays longer than an instant in the mind, but it’s beautiful in the same way as that plate.So now I’ll go back and reread them all, in light of the mysteries of memory and time, and in appreciation of something truly different and impressive.
    • 5/5
      There's not much to say about this book, it just leaves me speechless just thinking about it! It is so beautiful! (and I'm so so sad I've never got my copy back after lending it to someone!) One day I will definitely buy another copy when I have the money!
    • 4/5
      Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather is a short story collection by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. It’s a short book, only 125 pages, and I read it to fulfill my books in translation requirement in the Reading across Borders Challenge, my “X” author [yes, I know the Chinese last name, first name deal, but it is filed under ‘X’ in bookstores], and as a book that meets the requirement for the Book Awards Challenge.There are only 6 stories in this collection, and they were picked by Gao himself to represent his writing in an English translation. In the translator’s notes, she indicated that Gao “warns readers that his fiction does not set out to tell a story. There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself.”Of the six stories, I found the last two, “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather” and “In an Instant” to be the most interesting. The first involves memories of childhood and the feeling that you ‘can’t go home again’. Here is a quote from that story: "Even so, I want to buy him a fishing rod. It’s hard to explain, and I’m not going to try. It’s simply something that I want to do. For me the fishing rod is my grandfather and my grandfather is the fishing rod."The last story, “In an Instant,” sort of feels like a psychedelic trip. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on in the story, but it sure was interesting. Here is one of those ‘interesting’ paragraphs: "He is sitting at the computer with a cigarette in his mouth. A long sentence appears on the screen. “What” is not to understand “what” is to understand or not is not to understand that even when “what” is understood, it is not understood, for “what” is to understand and “what” is not to understand, “what” is “what” and “is not” is “is not,” and so is not to understand not wanting to understand or simply not understanding why “what” needs to be understood or whether “what” can be understood, and also it is not understood whether “what” is really not understood or that it simply hasn’t been rendered so that it can be understood or is really understood but that there is a pretense not to understand or a refusal to try to understand or is pretending to want to understand yet deliberately not understanding or actually trying unsuccessfully to understand, then so what if it’s not understood and if it’s not understood, then why go to all this trouble of wanting to understand it–"Hmm, you tell me!