'FISHING ROD' | A review Author engages readers with hints of significance

Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian weaves stories in which language is key.
By CHARLES MATTHEWS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather," by Gao Xingjian (HarperCollins, $17.95)
The stories in "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather" by Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize in literature for 2000, are filled with details -- a precariously hanging roof tile, a red handbag, a song playing on the radio -- that have an eerie cinematic clarity and emit tantalizing hints of significance. Yet Gao would insist that the significance is in us, not in the stories.
In "The Accident," for example, a man on a bicycle that has been fitted with a carrier for a small child is struck by a trolley. The man dies; the child apparently survives. But the story isn't about either of them, but rather the scene in which it takes place -- the street, the shops, the traffic, the people that surround and are temporarily affected by the accident.
As the narrator of the story comments, the accident can feed traffic statistics, fill space in a newspaper, even "serve as the raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: This would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o'clock, in the central section of Desheng Avenue in front of the radio repair shop." The creation, in other words, occurs in the mind of the observer -- or in the case of Gao's stories, the reader.
Aiming for effect
As the translator, Mabel Lee, points out, Gao is interested less in telling a story than in the way the language of his stories affects the reader. The dreamlike title story verges on nostalgia in the narrator's account of his relationship with his grandfather but also makes us aware of the sometimes terrifying burden of memory. And the last story in the book, "In an Instant," evokes the era of modernist experimentation -- a place we perhaps don't want to return to -- but as in all of these stories, the force of Gao's imagination is spellbinding.