Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

by Gao Xingjian

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061871573
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	142
File size:	525 KB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
Stories

Chapter One

The Temple

We were deliriously happy: delirious with the hope, infatuation, tenderness, and warmth that go with a honeymoon. Fangfang and I had planned the trip over and over, even though we had only half a month off: ten days of wedding leave, plus one week of additional work leave. Getting married is a major event in life, and for us nothing was more important, so why not ask for some extra time? That director of mine was so miserly: anyone who went to him requesting leave had to haggle; there were never instant approvals. The two weeks I had written in my application he changed to one week, including a Sunday, and it was with reluctance that he said, "I'll expect you to be back at work by the due date."

"Of course, of course," I said. "We wouldn't be able to afford the salary deduction if we stayed any longer." It was only then that he signed his name, thereby granting us permission to go on leave.

I wasn't a bachelor anymore. I had a family. I would no longer be able to go off to restaurants with friends as soon as I got paid at the beginning of the month. I wouldn't be able to spend so recklessly that by the end of the month I wouldn't have the money to buy a pack of cigarettes and would have to go through my pockets and search the drawers for coins. But I won't go into all that. I'm saying that I -- we -- were very happy. In our short lives, there hadn't been much happiness. Both Fangfang and I had experienced years of hardship, and we had learned what life was all about. During those catastrophic years in this country, our families suffered through many misfortunes, and to some extent we still resented our generation's fate. But I won't go into that, either. What was important was that we could now count ourselves happy.

We had half a month's leave, and although it was only half a honeymoon, for us it couldn't have been sweeter. I am not going to go into how sweet it was. You all know about that and have experienced it yourselves, but this particular sweetness was ours alone. What I want to tell you about is the Temple of Perfect Benevolence: "perfect" as in "perfect union," and "benevolence" as in "benevolent love." But the name of the temple is not really of great importance. It was a dilapidated ruin, and certainly not a famous tourist attraction. No one knew about it other than the locals, and I suspect that even the locals who knew what it was called were few. In any case, the temple we happened to visit wasn't one where people burned incense or prayed, and if we hadn't carefully examined the stone tablet with traces of writing in the drain of the water pump we wouldn't even have known that the temple had a name. The locals referred to it as "the big temple," but it was nothing compared with the Retreat for the Soul Temple, in Hangzhou, or the Jade Cloud Temple, in Beijing. Situated on a hill beyond the town, it was little more than an old two-story building with flying eaves and the remnants of a stone gate in front of it. The courtyard walls had collapsed. The bricks of the outer wall had been carried off by peasants to build their houses or construct pens for their pigs, and only a circle of unfired bricks remained, overgrown with weeds.

However, from a distance, from the small street of the county town, the glazed yellow tiles sparkling in the sunlight caught our eyes. We had come to this town quite by accident. Our train was still at the platform after the announced departure time, probably waiting for an express that was behind schedule to pass through. The chaotic scramble of passengers getting on and off had settled and, apart from the conductors chatting at the carriage doors, there was no one on the platform. Beyond the station was a valley with an expanse of gray roofs. Farther still, a chain of heavily wooded mountains gave this ancient town an exceptional air of tranquillity.

Suddenly I had an idea. I said, "Should we take a look at this town?"

Fangfang, sitting opposite and looking at me lovingly, gave a slight nod. Her eyes seemed to speak, and, sensitive to each other, we communicated on the same wavelength. Without a word, we took our bags from the luggage rack and rushed to the door of our carriage. As soon as we had jumped onto the platform, we both laughed.

I said, "We'll leave on the next train."

"I don't mind if we don't leave at all,"Fangfang answered.

After all, we were traveling, and it was our honeymoon. If we fell in love with a place, we would go there, and if we went on liking the place, we would stay longer. All the time, wherever we went, the happiness of newlyweds accompanied us. We were the happiest people in the world. Fangfang was holding my arm; I was holding our bags. We wanted the conductors on the platform and the countless pairs of eyes on the other side of the train windows to look at us with envy.

We no longer had to drive ourselves mad trying to get transferred back to the city. Nor did we have to keep begging our parents for help. And we didn't have to worry about our residential status or our jobs anymore. We even had our own apartment, our own home; it wasn't very big, but it was comfortable. You belonged to me and I belonged to you, and, Fangfang, I know what you want to say: Our relationship was no longer immoral! And what does that mean? It means that we want everyone to share in our happiness ...

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
Stories. Copyright © by Gao Xingjian. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	The Temple	1
	In the Park	17
	Cramp	33
	The Accident	43
	Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather	61
	In an Instant	89
	Translator's Note	123

Editorial Reviews

Six stories, published in Chinese between 1983 and 1991, offer a sample of Nobel-winner Gao's sharp, poetic early work. In "The Temple," the unnamed narrator and his new bride alter their honeymoon plans to pause in a provincial town. Though the two are blissfully happy, they find the town's inhabitants and its Temple of Perfect Benevolence vaguely disquieting. A muted reference to the Cultural Revolution ("It all felt so different from the time when we were graduates sent to work in the countryside") may explain the unease. Gao (Soul Mountain; One Man's Bible) explores the simultaneous enormity and anonymity of death in "The Accident," when a man on a bicycle with an attached baby buggy rides, either carelessly or deliberately, into a bus. The man is killed, but his young son survives; a crowd forms, passing around rumors, while the cops take away the bus driver and the blood on the road congeals. The title story employs collages of memory and haunting daydreams to mourn the destruction of the narrator's grandfather's village. A "sparkling lake" has been paved over, and the river where the narrator and his grandfather used to fish is dry: "The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything. It has swallowed the riverbank and now wants to swallow the city along with your childhood memories and mine." Gao intends his stories to reveal "the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality"-storytelling, in other words, is not his goal. These spare, evocative pieces bear that out; often the lovely prose (nicely translated by Lee) is reward enough. (Feb. 6) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This collection of six short stories from Nobel prize winner Gao Xingjian consists of five works previously published in China and one published in Stockholm. Like many short story authors, Gao leaves each of his stories open-ended, with no actual conclusion to the plot, leaving readers to interpret the work for themselves. Yet what stands out most in Gao's writing is its distinct stream-of-consciousness style, which is also seen in his earlier autobiographical novel One Man's Bible. Notable stories in this collection include "The Temple," in which a young man describes his physically challenging honeymoon travels to a distant temple; "The Accident," the story of a father and son who are tragically hit by a bus while riding a bicycle; and the title piece, in which a man recollects time spent with his beloved grandfather. As a whole, the collection is a fast read, but the literary nature of Gao's writing makes it a challenge. Best suited for academic libraries, larger public libraries with Chinese literature collections, and those owning Gao's previous titles. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/03.]-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The 2000 Nobel laureate's declaration "that his fiction does not set out to tell a story" is supported by the six tales in this first translated collection That aesthetic is thus summarized by scholar Lee, who has translated Gao's ramshackle major novels Soul Mountain (2000) and One Man's Bible (2002) and now these terse chamber pieces, which appeared separately during the years 1983-91 and together as part of a larger Chinese language collection. They're generally "about" individual experiences seen in relation to larger contexts. For example, "Cramp" ironically contrasts a lone swimmer's near-death experience to the indifference of the life that swirls energetically around him. "The Temple" opposes the jubilant happiness of newlyweds to the resigned despair of a man unable to adopt the presumably orphaned boy on whom he dotes-and in "In the Park," a woman weeping on a nearby bench provides counterpoint to a muted meeting between two former lovers whose lives had diverged years before. The wistful title story associates memories of its narrator's stoical impoverished grandparents with such haunting images as that of a dried-up lake filled in with "unmoving big round rocks, like a flock of dumb sheep huddled close to one another." A narrator's presence is even more strongly felt in "In an Instant," which parades before a man sitting alone on a beach kaleidoscopic images of his childhood, youth, love life, and, perhaps, his own impending death-and in this volume's best offering, "The Accident." It records an episode in which a bicyclist hauling a small child in an attached "buggy" is hit and killed by a bus. The story becomes in its telling all the possible stories inherent in variousobservers' and bystanders' partial accounts of what they've seen, and think they've seen. Inconsistently developed, but precisely detailed and delicately suggestive: the best work of Gao's yet to appear in English translation. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Inc.

Kirkus Reviews

For all their elusiveness, these impressionistic sketches have an austere power.” — New York Times Book Review

“Dreamlike … the force of Gao’s imagination is spellbinding.” — San Jose Mercury News

“A collection of superb short stories that deftly experiment with language and narrative form … the elegant simplicity of [Gao’s] meditations on memory, loss, and love ache beautifully with a melancholic desire to understand the past… immensely rewarding and enriching.” — Rocky Mountain News

“[Gao’s] narrators walk as if in a dream through a private landscape of memory and sensation.” — Boston Globe

“Beautiful.” — Village Voice

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

“These spare, evocative pieces. . . offer a sample of Nobel-winner Gao’s sharp, poetic early work.” — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Beautiful.

Village Voice

Dreamlike … the force of Gao’s imagination is spellbinding.

San Jose Mercury News

For all their elusiveness, these impressionistic sketches have an austere power.

New York Times Book Review

A collection of superb short stories that deftly experiment with language and narrative form … the elegant simplicity of [Gao’s] meditations on memory, loss, and love ache beautifully with a melancholic desire to understand the past… immensely rewarding and enriching.

Rocky Mountain News

[Gao’s] narrators walk as if in a dream through a private landscape of memory and sensation.

Boston Globe