An unsuccessful experiment--for me anyway. He may have something to say, but this collection of six short stories left me unconvinced. In fairness, I only read five and a half. The first four simply didn’t amount to much: simple, straightforward stories, the point of which escaped me in every instance. I don’t mind that nothing much “happened.” I don’t need an intricate plot or story, though I will admit that I do enjoy a narrative of some sort. The first four stories provided that. However. I’m not especially good at delving deep into the structure or text in order to come up with its substance/meaning/significance. But these all require that to one degree or another. The fifth story I finally just gave up on. It lacked narrative, it lacked sense, and finally, even the structure fell apart. As I wrote elsewhere, I quit when I got to this: "'What is not to understand and '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..." and so on for another six lines. The prose in the first five stories is comprehensible even if not engaging. I am too lazy to bother with this. I don’t know whether he writes for readers to read or for himself. I will try Soul Mountain at some point, but at least I’ll have a notion of what to expect. I think. ( )

This collection of six short stories by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian were tied together by their sense of impending doom and loss.

"The Temple" is the story of a couple on their honeymoon who impulsively get off the train in a village and hike up to an old temple. There, a man approaches them while ominous music played in my head. Although nothing untoward happened, the story ends with a loose tile hanging overhead about to fall.

"In the Park" is a conversation between a man and a woman who are meeting after a long separation. There is attraction between them, but the woman is married. Before long the repressed emotions come out as frustrated anger. In the background a woman has clearly been waiting for someone, but when he fails to appear, she bursts into tears.

"Cramp" begins with a man swimming in the ocean at night. He gets a cramp and worries that he won't make it to shore. Does anyone see him out there? The story ends with a woman on crutches watching two friends swimming.

"The Accident" begins almost in slow motion, with a man on a bicycle pulling a child in an attached carrier passing in front of a bus. As a crowd gathers around the accident, the language speeds up until all we hear are snippets of conversation. The story ends with the narrator (author?) saying,

I have been discussing philosophy again, but life is not philosophy, even if philosophy can derive from knowledge of life. And there is no need to turn life's traffic accidents into statistics, because that's a job for the traffic department or the public security department. Of course, a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can 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 title story, although it sounds prosaic, is actually a confused narrative that mixes memories with a dream state while a soccer game plays on tv in the background. It's about lost childhoods, lost family, and the drastic changes brought to a village by modernization.

"In an Instant" begins with a man in a deck chair looking out at the ocean. But this narrative is broken, with paragraphs about a woman and her sexual proclivities interspersed. Each time the story reverts to the man in the chair, the water is higher, until only the chair is floating. Then it gets weird. ( )

UNA CAÑA DE PESCAR PARA EL ABUELO

"Iré a las afueras, a la orilla del río de las afueras al que el abuelo me llevó a ... ¿pescar?, recuerdo que el abuelo me llevó al río, no me acuerdo con claridad
si pescamos algo, pero recuerdo que tenía un abuelo y una infancia y que en esos años de infancia me sentía muy mal cuando mi madre me bañaba desnudo
en el patio ... me viene a la memoria un poema cuyo protagonista Ileva el cuerpo cubierto de cuchillos de caza tintineantes , una libélula sin cola revolotea sobre
sobre el lugar, los criticos tienen padrastros en los ojos y el mentón ancho, quiero escribir una novela profunda , tan profunda que las moscas perezcan ahogadas
en ella y luego veo la espalda del abuelo sentado en cuclillas sobre un taburete fumando encorvado una pipa, abuelo, lo llamo pero no oye, me llego a su lado y lo
llamo de nuevo, abuelo, y esta vez se vuelve, pero no sujeta en su mano ninguna pipa"

«Lo más importante no es la ficción, sino la narración,
de la misma manera que evito la descripción y busco la evocación.
En pintura, los detalles conservan todo su sentido; en literatura
acaban por ocultarte lo que quieres mostrar. El exceso
de palabras te lleva a no ver nada.»

Gah. First I want to say that the eponymous story in this collection is really good, 4/5 stars. The rest of the stories are quite good, and different from other things I've read. The way they're different is in the fact that, beyond the titular story, Xingjian's translation does not use too much wordplay or prose to get across his 'message'. I'm not sure if there is a message, really, because what he's doing is trying to tell a story behind the story he's actually telling. The story you read isn't all that interesting, but the hints at what's beneath, or the way he gets you to think beyond the story, is very interesting. I only wish the writing didn't come off as so simple.
I would give this 3.5/5 stars, but that's not an option. It's short and good, so I would suggest reading it. I may re-read some of the stories. ( )

Written by the first Chinese Nobel Prize winner for Literature, this is a collection of stories woven together. It was a good read, but not a great read. Clearly he knows how to tell a story -but I don't know if it is the translation, to the stories themselves, I felt they were uneven in their telling; some were quite good, while others were hard to follow, and seemed to meander. It is a short book, and interesting, but again, not, in my opinion, a great book. ( )