Curling up with a good book: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

Complete title: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories
Author: Gao Xingjian

Less is more apparently. This book of short stories is a real quick read--I finished it in a couple of hours--but very impressive. Like "Seinfeld"--famously a show about nothing--not much really happens. It's all about imagery and conjuring up emotions. Also too, there is a strong sense of melancholy that pervades the work. Julia Lovell's review, originally published in the Guardian on May 15, 2004, indicates that Gao's full-length novels might not be the best starting point, so I'm very glad that I made my acquaintance with "Buying."

"Soul Mountain" and "One Man's Bible," the two novels for which he was awarded the 2000 Nobel literature prize, defined Gao Xingjian as a writer with three signature themes. The first was his libido; the second was the individual (and his libido) suffering under communism. Both books starred a strongly autobiographical, middle-aged protagonist working through the traumas of political persecution and exile by "merging" with almost every woman he met.

So far, so dull. Mid-life crises--even those induced by communism--tend to be interesting mainly to their sufferers, and Gao's sprawling, self-indulgent take on the horrors of political oppression lacked the wry discipline that, for example, Solzhenitsyn and Kundera have brought to similar subject matter. Gao's fascination with himself had the additional unfortunate consequence of sidelining his third, and most interesting concern as a novelist. Like many serious Chinese authors of the past 100 years--a century in which writers began systematically reading, worshipping, sometimes imitating modern western literature--he has spent his career searching for a literary language and form that manage to be both modern and Chinese; in other words, a voice that is more than a rehash of western modernism.

Gao has tried to achieve this by combining the structural looseness of traditional Chinese literature - weak on plot, strong on emotive imagery--with a western-style fixation on subjectivity and alienation. The novels that resulted, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, caught the worst of both eastern and western literary worlds--rambling, self-obsessed and over-theorised-- and forgot the key lesson Ezra Pound, the high priest of Anglo-American modernism, drew from classical Chinese literature: show, don't tell.

The short stories collected in Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather are a far better showcase of Gao's literary talents. Shrink Gao's fiction from 500 to 10 pages, take out the pseudo-philosophical self-obsession, and the reader starts to see glimmerings of a very Chinese narrative discipline, of an author who can communicate depths of feeling through snatches of conversation and single, well-chosen images.

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: a ruined old temple to the west. 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.

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: the "wan yellow light" of the streetlamps, the "grey and indistinct" night sky in which even the stars are hazy.

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. "The Accident" is a slice-of-life account of a fatal bicycle accident that turns into a heavy-handed literary sermon on the workings of fate, and the relationship between life's raw material and artistic creation.

The story of the title, "Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather", is intriguingly framed as a self-delusory nostalgia trip, but collapses into Gao's ponderous version of western modernism-by-numbers: surreal juxtapositions of time and place, stream of consciousness, a fragmented narrative voice locked into tediously self-analytical conversation with itself. "Do you have an inner world? I hope so. It's only there that you can really be yourself." The final story, "In an Instant", is a formal experiment in simultaneity that runs through a checklist of modernist devices--narrative cuts and leaps, bizarre images, Beckettian clowns--as mechanically as an English undergraduate's revision primer.

At its worst, Gao's short fiction sums up everything that is wrong with his absorption of western influences: unoriginal, ill-digested, over-philosophised. But at its best, it achieves the understated, expressive concision that defines China's singular contribution to modern literature.