Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather

Self-restraint has helped Gao Xingjian's writing. Julia Lovell finds Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather short and sweet.
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Like a short puzzle. The titular story talks about environment degradation, but it makes you feel it, without preaching. We all have experienced, like this middle-class Chinese man, the disappearance of the villages we used to play in.

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We have all seen inexplicable tears in the eyes of our grandparents, who cannot fish on a lake of cement. The mix of surrealism with plain talk makes this story haunting. One person found this helpful. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. I chose a stories book. And it was worth it. The experience is similar to taking six trips in one-go. The author is an excellent guide. He will take you to "The Temple", which is a projection of a shield to protect the happiness of newlyweds against persistent anxiety.


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These are intriguing stories written by a Chinese writer who eventually claimed French citizenship. The stories take place in China. Gao's style is simple, bare-boned, meditative evocative. I recommend this little volume to anyone interested in this talented writer of "Soul Mountain" who won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in This is a great book of short stories from one of China's expatriates.


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    • The stories range in topic, and perhaps are a reflection of the author's own writing evolution. Didn't like the first pages of this author's 'Soul Mountain', his most famous novel, but these stories, all but one written before Gao left China, are well-defined, strong evocations of mood and situations.

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    They are strangely engaging even when there is no plot. 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. The thing 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.

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    These stories, by design, are not plot driven in the slightest. In fact, an afterword contains the following information: There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself. 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.


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    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.

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    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.

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    See all 17 reviews. Most recent customer reviews. Published on November 29, Published on April 4, Published on December 21, Published on August 8, Published on June 10, Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. The best - and, not coincidentally, the shortest - stories are the first three.

    In "The Temple", a recently married couple decide on impulse to spend a day of their honeymoon in a "quiet old town in the valley". A local recommends the nearest thing the town has to a tourist attraction: There, the couple encounter a local taking his cousin's child out to catch grasshoppers. In the few words exchanged between the three adults, Gao suggests the simple hospitality of strangers, a family tragedy, the devastation of a moment's tactlessness.

    Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather

    The two speakers of "In the Park" - a dialogue interrupted only by present-tense descriptions of scenery and incidental action - are childhood sweethearts separated by political events. Now approaching middle age, they reunite for a brief, chance rendezvous before returning to their unsatisfactory spouses. The shared bitterness of frustrated romance hangs, barely spoken, over their meeting, intensified by the drab palette of their surroundings: In "Cramp", a nocturnal swimmer at an unspecified seaside resort is stricken by cramp, almost drowns, then battles the tide back to land.

    Invigorated by his brush with mortality, he returns to his hotel "in a hurry to tell people he's just escaped death". Finding no one interested, he goes back to the beach, where he observes three other visitors, two boys and a girl. While the boys gallop off into the sea, the girl remains on the sand, "supporting herself on crutches", the swimmer suddenly notices. With few plot details to distract him, Gao concentrates on emotional contrasts, the swimmer's reckless vitality a foil to the wistful solitude of the crippled girl.

    The remaining three stories rarely recapture the authorial self-restraint that made the earlier pieces appealing.