2006 books

[peteryoung]

47) Gao Xingjian, Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather, 2004
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 it as I'd hoped, though the last story 'In an Instant' does become rather cleverly hypnotic. These are the stories 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.