Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (9 page)
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Authors: Gao Xingjian
Seen through the window, facing the sun, in the distance, on the desolate beach, there seems to be a man sitting in a deck chair, his back to the sea, with a towel draped over him. With one hand he pushes aside the hat over his face and with the other he retrieves a book from the sand and starts reading it.
Gao Xingjian’s fiction, plays, and critical essays on literature began to appear in literary magazines for the first time in China during the early 1980s. His book
Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan
(
Preliminary Explorations on the Art of Modern Fiction
, 1981) created a sensation in the Chinese literary world but was banned upon being reprinted in 1982. Arguably, the 1980s were much more liberal than the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which time Gao had burned all his manuscripts, diaries, and notes rather than allow them to be found and used as life-threatening evidence against him. Nonetheless, even while conscientiously exercising self-censorship, he found that his writings still caused him to be denounced for promoting the decadent modernism of Western capitalist literature. In December 1987, when the opportunity arose,
he left China for Europe. Some months later he settled in Paris, where he has lived since.
Gao himself has selected the six stories of this English-language version of
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
: it is his view that these stories are best able to represent what he is striving to achieve in his fiction. The stories, “The Temple,” “In the Park,” “The Accident,” “Cramp,” and “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather,” written in Beijing between 1983 and 1986, were first published in various literary magazines in China. These five stories are included in Gao’s seventeen-story collection,
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
(
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
), which he compiled a few weeks prior to his departure from China. This collection suffered the fate of being rejected by all the major publishers in China but was eventually published in Taiwan in 1989. The last of the stories, “In an Instant,” written in Paris in October 1990, was first published in Stockholm in the Chinese literary magazine
Jintian
(
Today
) and then included in Gao’s
Zhoumo sichongzou
(
Weekend Quartet
), published in Hong Kong in 1996.
While still in Beijing Gao wrote a brief postscript for his seventeen-story collection,
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather,
in which he 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. More explicit is his proposal
that the linguistic art of fiction is “the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality in writing,” and that its power to fascinate lies in the fact that, even while employing language, it is able to evoke authentic feelings in the reader. The stories of
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
and the novels
Lingshan
(1990; translated as
Soul Mountain
, 2000) and
Yige ren de shengjing
(1999; translated as
One Man’s Bible
, 2002) document the scope of Gao’s unique and continuing experimentation in the genre.
Mabel Lee
U
NIVERSITY OF
S
YDNEY
G
AO
X
INGJIAN
is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi Province in eastern China, he studied in state schools, earned a university degree in French in Beijing, and embarked on a life of letters. Choosing exile in 1987, he settled in Paris, where he completed
Soul Mountain
two years later. In 1992 he was named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Art et des Lettres by the French government. He is a playwright and painter as well as a fiction writer and critic.
M
ABEL
L
EE
, P.
H
.D., has been a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. Dr. Lee is one of Australia’s leading authorities on Chinese cultural affairs. She has translated both of Gao Xingjian’s novels,
Soul Mountain
and
One Man’s Bible
.
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RAISE
FOR
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
“Beautiful…. Suffused with the melancholy of nostalgia.”
—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“[Gao’s] narrators walk as if in a dream through a private landscape of memory and sensation.”
—
Boston Globe
“Precisely detailed and delicately suggestive: the best work of Gao’s yet to appear in English translation.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“Beautiful.”
—
Village Voice
“These spare, evocative pieces…offer a sample of Nobel-winner Gao’s sharp, poetic early work.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Observant…. For variety of content, stylistic experimentation, graceful language, and poignant insight, Xingjian is a writer who does it all beautifully.”
—
Booklist
Y
G
AO
X
INGJIAN
Novels
Soul Mountain
One Man’s Bible
Stories
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather
Art
Return to Painting
“The Temple” was first published in Chinese as “
Yuan en si
” in
Haiyan
7 (Dalian, 1983). First collected in Gao Xingjian,
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
(Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in
The New Yorker
(February 17 and 24, 2003).
“In the Park” was first published in Chinese as “
Gongyuan li
” in
Nanfang wenxue
4 (Guangzhou, 1985). First collected in Gao Xingjian,
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
(Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in
The Kenyon Review
26, no. 1 (winter 2004).
“Cramp” was first published in Chinese as “
Choujin
” in
Xiaoshuo zhoubao
1 (Beijing, 1985). First collected in Gao Xingjian,
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
(Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989).
“The Accident” was first published in Chinese as “
Chehuo
” in
Fujian wenxue
5 (Fuzhou, 1985). First collected in Gao Xingjian,
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
(Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in
The New Yorker
(June 2, 2003).
“Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather” was first published in Chinese as “
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
” in
Renmin wenxue
9 (Beijing, 1986). First collected in Gao Xingjian,
Gei wo laoye mai yugan
(Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in
Grand Street
72 (fall 2003).
“In an Instant” was first published in Chinese as “
Shunjian
” in
Jintian
1 (Stockholm, 1991), and first collected in
Zhoumo sichongzou
(Hong Kong: New Century Publishing House, 1996).
BUYING A FISHING ROD FOR MY GRANDFATHER
. Copyright © 2004 by Gao Xingjian. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2007 ISBN: 9780061871573
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Gao, Xingjian.
[Gei wo lao ye mai yu gan. English]
Buying a fishing rod for my grandfather: stories / Gao
Xingjian; [translated by Mabel Lee].—1st ed.
p. cm.
Contents: The temple—In the park—Cramp—The accident—
Buying a fishing rod for my grandfather—In an instant.
ISBN 0-06-057555-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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