Wow! What a beautiful sense of place. Sky Burial tells the story of Shu Wen, a woman who desperately seeks answers about her new husband’s death. Given no details by the government, Shu Wen feels she must know the truth of what has happened to him. Seeing no other way to find the answers she seeks, she joins the military (as a doctor) so she can be stationed in Tibet, where the death is reported to have taken place.
Due to Chinese/Tibetan conflict, she is separated from her unit and eventually spends over 30 years in Tibet, learning the language and the culture. Very different from the Chinese, the Tibetans are a deeply religious, nomadic people. Their family life seems strange to Shu Wen also. The family that takes her in is a wife with two husbands (brothers — who also do the sewing!). Finally, after three decades, the family is able to help her in her quest for answers about her husband.
What makes this all the more interesting is that this book is based on an actual woman that Xinran met and spoke to about these experiences. My only downgrade to the book is that after reaching the end, it felt a little unfinished. I felt that I wanted to know more about what happened to Shu Wen. Xinran did as well, and in the afterword she writes her a letter desiring contact, but I don’t believe the author ever heard from her again.
Recommended.
2004 (2005 for the English translation); 224 pp. Rating: 4/5
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather is a short story collection by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. It’s a short book, only 125 pages, and I read it to fulfill my books in translation requirement in the Reading across Borders Challenge, my “X” author [yes, I know the Chinese last name, first name deal, but it is filed under 'X' in bookstores], and as a book that meets the requirement for the Book Awards Challenge.
There are only 6 stories in this collection, and they were picked by Gao himself to represent his writing in an English translation. In the translator’s notes, she indicated that Gao “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.”
Of the six stories, I found the last two, “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather” and “In an Instant” to be the most interesting. The first involves memories of childhood and the feeling that you ‘can’t go home again’. Here is a quote from that story:
Even so, I want to buy him a fishing rod. It’s hard to explain, and I’m not going to try. It’s simply something that I want to do. For me the fishing rod is my grandfather and my grandfather is the fishing rod.
The last story, “In an Instant,” sort of feels like a psychedelic trip. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on in the story, but it sure was interesting. Here is one of those ‘interesting’ paragraphs:
He is sitting at the computer with a cigarette in his mouth. A long sentence appears on the screen. “What” is not to understand “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 but that there is a pretense not to understand or a refusal to try to understand or is pretending to want to understand yet deliberately not understanding or actually trying unsuccessfully to understand, then so what if it’s not understood and if it’s not understood, then why go to all this trouble of wanting to understand it–
Sky Burial by Xinran
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather is a short story collection by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. It’s a short book, only 125 pages, and I read it to fulfill my books in translation requirement in the Reading across Borders Challenge, my “X” author [yes, I know the Chinese last name, first name deal, but it is filed under 'X' in bookstores], and as a book that meets the requirement for the Book Awards Challenge.
