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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Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, 1999

A long and completely detached autobiographical but fictionalised retrospective on Gao’s time as a revolutionary Party cadré under China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, and a navel-gazing analysis of how women and sex have shaped him throughout his life. In this account of his life Gao has deliberately divorced himself from his past: he refers to his younger self in the third person and to his present 1990s self in the second person throughout, which at times makes it something of a challenge to follow the dual threads but is still a neat literary device. Often heavy going and ponderous (as one might expect from a Nobel Laureate), it nevertheless does offer a unique first-hand insight into the paranoid nightmare that was everyday life under Mao.  PY

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Xiaolu Guo, UFO in her Eyes, 2009

Guo’s debut in English Village of Stone was a slow-burning but ultimately great read, so this one is a must-see. Despite the title her concerns aren’t in the least science fictional and the UFO is merely a McGuffin for some Chinese government officials investigating the sighting, something that sets off all the subsequent events. This is a crossover story in a number of ways: what we have in book form has been modelled as a lively film script, a format Guo-the-filmmaker clearly wants to do as a book in its own right; meanwhile Guo-the-author is bringing a couple of predominantly Western cultural facets (UFOs and 9/11) and shoehorning them into her own unsuspecting culture, a near-future rural China, with the result of rapid and mostly unnecessary development that changes the face of a town while leaving its people behind. It’s a beautifully produced book that's typographically inventive with plenty of stuff that makes the pages turn fast, but I found as a whole the story lacks much substance; by the end one is asking what has everyone achieved apart from putting the small town of Silver Hill a little more prominently on the 21st Century Chinese cultural map. The multiple viewpoints work well together with much wit and profanity (but again, at the expense of characterisation); the interview format for the entire book is original but it’s a novel that doesn’t do much more than scratch at some surfaces despite some clearly referenced gender and class issues: the novel is meant to be fun, and is.  PY

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Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2000

A good story set in 1970s China in the grip of Cultural Revolution, when Western books were banned because of their ‘decadence’. Two friends sent into the country for re-education by peasants come across a stash of translated French literature, and this informs their relationship with a young seamstress who becomes enchanted by the words of Balzac. Good fun and spirited, with the kind of slightly cynical tone you would expect the telling of such a tale to have, and the film version which Dai also directed supplies some excellent visual richness. Recommended.  PY

Shan Sa, The Girl Who Played Go, 2001

Set in 1930s Manchuria in a town that lies in the path of the advancing Japanese army, a young girl who is unusually adept at the game of Go finds herself falling into the circle of some young Chinese revolutionaries determined to repel their country’s Japanese invaders. Told as both her own first-person story and that of one of the invading Japanese soldiers, the two opposing viewpoints eventually meet over a long and protracted game of Go after he is asked to disguise himself as Chinese and look for signs of insurrection in the town. Both characters are less wise than they think they are, she in her naïvety about love and he in his belief in the correctness of the Japanese invasion when comparing his rigid culture to that of the more easy-going Chinese. Go is a boardgame about defending and claiming territory from your opponent, so while their game mirrors the invasion that is defining both their lives this rather obvious metaphor fortunately never becomes too overbearing.

Chinese author Shan Sa has already won several French and Japanese literary awards for her two previous novels, and she is certainly able to build a convincing backdrop for her story’s theme and subtext. It has other important subtleties, and is also insightful into both Chinese and Japanese opinions of each other in that particular era. This novel ultimately takes on the dimensions of a love story between the two protagonists – albeit a rather curious and tragic one – and while it draws you along very nicely, nevertheless the odd and ultimately illogical (though probably inevitable) ending will very likely have some more literary types raising an eyebrow or two.   PY

•  The Girl Who Played Go won the 2001 Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the 2004 Kiriyama Prize for fiction.

Xiaolu Guo, Village of Stone, 2004

Xiaolu comments in her acknowledgements for Village of Stone that it is still a long journey to carry Chinese fiction to the West. I suspect that journey is made somewhat easier if you live in the West already and work in the media, as Xiaolu does on both counts, and possibly easier still if your fiction resembles the sort of melancholy Oriental autobiography (epitomised by Memoirs of a Geisha, Falling Leaves or Wild Swans) that has been welcomed on this side of the world with open arms. This is her sixth book, but the first to be published in English.

Village of Stone is told from the perspective of a young woman’s new life in present-day Beijing, being the story of her childhood when she was known to everyone as “Little Dog”, and who grew up in the Village of Stone on the typhoon-battered coast of China. She has an unusual upbringing that is shaped half by the sea and half by an assortment of dysfunctional family and neighbourly relationships. She is on the receiving end of more than her fair share of pain, sexual abuse and misadventure, all of which sets up the direction the book ultimately takes, which is that of forgiveness, maturing emotionally and letting go of the wrongs done to her.

Initially one gets the feeling that Xiaolu is telling everything and leaving nothing unsaid with the aim of making the story a deliberately tragic one, but by the halfway mark you sense a change of tack up ahead and understand the necessity for all the open-hearted detail that has gone before. Nevertheless Xiaolu can write, and I suspect there is a strong thread of autobiography running beneath the narrative. The result doesn’t work quite as well as something like Falling Leaves largely because we know this is fiction, though Xiaolu’s often frank directness meant that by the end I found myself prepared to believe almost every word. Quietly impressive.  PY

•  Village of Stone was shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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Marguerite Duras, The Lover, 1984

This is the briefer version of the same story covered in Marguerite Duras’s later alternate novel The North China Lover. It’s a book that seems to be universally popular, looking at a young French woman’s romantic encounter with a Chinese man in Saigon while exploring her own family’s less-than-straightforward internal relationships, and Duras never goes for the superficial when she can go several layers deeper. Within the first few pages it becomes a book that makes you suspend expectations and instead shows itself to be a small gem of unconventionally personal writing: you know it won’t end in any upbeat manner, and you can’t avoid the feeling that it’s also largely autobiographical because the emotional points of reference are all so vivid. A quietly memorable book for how Duras somehow takes you on an almost lifelong journey in so short a number of pages.   PY

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Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution, 1979

This short novel was begun in the early 1950s but not completed and published until 1979, and Ang Lee’s film won several trophies at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards. Set in occupied Shanghai during the Second World War it’s the story of a young student’s role in the entrapment of a Chinese minister who is a sympathiser of the occupying Japanese. The turbulent Chinese politics of the time always formed the backdrop to Chang’s novels and was never usually the story itself, so the political theme makes Lust, Caution an unusual story for her. It’s a convincingly told tale, and one in which the motives of all the characters are morally dubious. Chang was one of the most popular writers in China during her life but is largely out of print now in the English-speaking world, though Penguin are releasing a few titles in their Modern Classics series which, on the strength of this, will certainly be worth reading.   PY