Opening Sentence of the first short story 'The Temple': '...We were deliriously happy: delirious with the hope, infatuation, tenderness and warmth that go with a honeymoon...'

Gao Xingjian is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and reading the gentle but powerfully visual words in each story, I can understand why he was rewarded.

Each story is a snap shot of time. All the thoughts, conversations and scenes tumble one after the other to give the reader a brief glimpse of something real - a brief intrusion into someones life. He uses language to paint a picture of what the reader is 'seeing' there are no plots - not beginning, middle and end - just the story.

The first story, "The Temple," describes a honeymooning couple as they leave their train on the spur of the moment, on a whim, to explore a decaying hillside temple.

In, "In the Park," it is the aimless conversation between two villagers who meet by coincidence in a park and reclaim their childhood memories as they discuss what might be happening in the life of a young woman who is crying on a nearby park bench.

Next there is, "The Cramp," relates the life and death struggle of a swimmer who gets a bad cramp alone within sight of the shore,.

"The Accident," is about death - describing a minute by minute account of a fatal traffic accident between a pushbike and a bus on a Beijing street. The conversations swirl around from the crowd as they watch the events unfold, making up what they don't know. The police arrive and take care of the situation, street cleaners come to remove the broken bicycle and wipe the blood from the streets, and life continues on as if the death never occurred.

The title story follows "Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather - the main character sees a fishing rod which he knows his grandfather would love. As he travels to his grandfather's house he finds the old neighborhood is no longer recognizable from when he was there as a boy.

The final story "In an Instance" was the only story that didn't sweep me in. To be perfectly honest I am not sure what it was about so confess to giving up on it.

A slim little volume - worth picking up for the experience. I initially only picked it because I needed an author whose surname started with X for a reading challenge - I ended up loving what I was reading. ( )

There's not much to say about this book, it just leaves me speechless just thinking about it! It is so beautiful! (and I'm so so sad I've never got my copy back after lending it to someone!) One day I will definitely buy another copy when I have the money! ( )

These six stories by the Nobel Prize winner are like looking at 6 paintings, small portraits painted with words and impressions. They are not plot driven but more like slices of happenings, bits and pieces of thought, and small insights into a person’s life seemingly, at times, randomly cut and served. The best of the six is the book’s namesake, All of the stories are portraits of characters illustrating their hopes and fears with broad brush strokes of their past mingling with the present. Interesting experimentation with language especially with the final story called ‘In an Instant’. ( )

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather is a short story collection by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. It’s a short book, only 125 pages, and I read it to fulfill my books in translation requirement in the Reading across Borders Challenge, my “X” author [yes, I know the Chinese last name, first name deal, but it is filed under ‘X’ in bookstores], and as a book that meets the requirement for the Book Awards Challenge.

There are only 6 stories in this collection, and they were picked by Gao himself to represent his writing in an English translation. In the translator’s notes, she indicated that Gao “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.”

Of the six stories, I found the last two, “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather” and “In an Instant” to be the most interesting. The first involves memories of childhood and the feeling that you ‘can’t go home again’. Here is a quote from that story:

"Even so, I want to buy him a fishing rod. It’s hard to explain, and I’m not going to try. It’s simply something that I want to do. For me the fishing rod is my grandfather and my grandfather is the fishing rod."

The last story, “In an Instant,” sort of feels like a psychedelic trip. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on in the story, but it sure was interesting. Here is one of those ‘interesting’ paragraphs:

"He is sitting at the computer with a cigarette in his mouth. A long sentence appears on the screen. “What” is not to understand “what” is to understand or not is not to understand that even when “what” is understood, it is not understood, for “what” is to understand and “what” is not to understand, “what” is “what” and “is not” is “is not,” and so is not to understand not wanting to understand or simply not understanding why “what” needs to be understood or whether “what” can be understood, and also it is not understood whether “what” is really not understood or that it simply hasn’t been rendered so that it can be understood or is really understood but that there is a pretense not to understand or a refusal to try to understand or is pretending to want to understand yet deliberately not understanding or actually trying unsuccessfully to understand, then so what if it’s not understood and if it’s not understood, then why go to all this trouble of wanting to understand it–"

Hmm, you tell me! ( )

http://www.popmatters.com/books/revie... ( )