Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
These six stories by Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian transport the reader to moments where the fragility of love and life, and the haunting power of memory, are beautifully unveiled. 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 titlestory, 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.
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Gao Xingjian is a Nobel Prize (for literature) winner, and for that reason I perhaps expected more from this short story collection. This collection of six stories is selected from his book of seventeen short stories of the same name, and was published in English in 2004.
Most of the stories were written from 1983 to 1996 and published in literary magazines.
The translators note at the rear of the book contains the following statement:
While still in Beijing Gao wrote a brief postscript for this seventeen story collection... in which he 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. More explicit is the proposal that the linguistic art of fiction is “the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality in writing,” and that its power to fascinate lies in the fact that, even while employing language, it is able to evoke authentic feelings in the reader.”
