Gao Xingjian, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 2004

Six short tales from the 2000 Nobel Prize winner, these are succinct, ordinary stories that focus on small events, even moments, in people’s lives. Nevertheless I didn’t get as much out of this collection as I’d hoped, possibly because Gao’s habitual, philosophical navel-gazing that imbues much of his other translated work is largely absent here, and the results instead feel shackled by a self-imposed restraint – these stories are far more traditionally Chinese, with less emphasis on plot and more focus on emotive and experiential imagery. Nevertheless, these are the stories, all written between 1983 and 1990, that Gao believes best represent what he is now striving to achieve in his fiction, though one can’t help feeling what a loss it is that he had to destroy so much of his creative work in his more energetic youth under the Cultural Revolution.  PY

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