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Title: Kim by Rudyard Kipling ISBN: 0-8125-6575-4 Publisher: Tor Classics Pub. Date: 15 July, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $2.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.89 (47 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Kim- A friend To All The World
Comment: Other reviewers are correct when they complain that this book is extremely difficult to read; it is however brilliant.
You need a map of India and some knowledge of the Indian caste system to truly understand it. I had the map but admit that Kipling's use of slang when referring to certain characters was maddenning.
The odd assortment of charcters are great but Kim is the star of the show. Kim, an orphaned son of Anglo parents, is raised on the streets of Lahore where he befriends an old Tibetan Lama. Kim accompanies the Lama on his serach for a mystical river.
Along the way they come across the regiment in which Kim's Father served. Kim is adopted by the regiments two chaplains who turn Kim over to Colonel Creighton who runs a sophisticated spy system. Kim is sent to an English speaking Catholic school.The allure of the road to Kim is too enticing and during school holidays Kim goes on adventures with the likes of his friend the part time Afgahn horse trader and part time spy for the British.
Kim completes his education both in the school and on the road and he becomes an important member of the spy system.
Kim seems to benefit from the experience of everyone he touches and in turn evereyone Kim encounters seem to be better off by the experience.
His relationship with the lama is truly special and transforms Kim from street urchin into a compassionate young man whose strength keeps the Lama alive as they travel the Himalayas.
Kim is a truly delightful book if you are up to the challenge.
Rating: 3
Summary: Still worth reading
Comment: This is a very entertaining novel, though not as good as the best of Kipling's short stories. As an adventure-oriented bildungsroman, Kim is well constructed with its gradual exposure of the ethnic and religous diversity of India, its engaging characters, and good quality of writing. While written as an adventure novel, Kim is also Kipling's prediction of the British Raj would become. The hero, Kim O'Hara, is in many ways an idealization of what saw as the logical conclusion of British India; a hybrid composed of both Indian and British elements. In an ironic way, this is how things turned out in British India. But where Kim is ethnically British with a largely Indian cultural background, the real inheritors of the British Raj were ethnic Indians (of a variety of ethnicities, castes, and faiths) whose outlook is colored strongly by Western influences.
How this book is read in a 'post-colonial' era is an interesting question. It would be easy, and wrong, to dismiss this book merely as an Imperialist tract, though Kipling clearly supported British Imperial control. It is even wronger to attack Kipling's racism, though there are unquestionably stereotyped elements present. In many ways, Kim is a celebration of India's ethnic and religous diversity. Probably the most unsympathetic characters in the book are not Indian, but Britishers with provincial outlooks. Kipling's support of the Empire is rather more subtle. It is clear that he viewed the existence of the huge and relatively tolerant polyglot society that was the Raj as the result of relatively benign British rule and protection. This is probably true. Without British overlordship, India is likely to have been a congeries of competing states riven by ethnic and religous divisions. Where Kipling is profoundly misleading is what he leaves out, particularly the economic exploitation India and crucial role India played in the Imperial economy.
Rating: 4
Summary: a mild but quite thorough story of initiation:
Comment: Kim is honestly a fun book. This is not to say that there aren't lapses, tedious mirings that swirl around the overall ebullient excitment, but these stem more from an excess of the author's wordplay than from anything else. The story is on the surface rather quaint: Orphaned British tyke grows up alone in India, has the internal wits and capacity to learn basic survival skills and has the ambition and sense of humor to make something of a name for himself. From there he meets a 'holy man'--not one in the traditional sense of Western (or even Eastern) literature, but here is more of a true seeker, someone not pulled down by the conventions of organized religiousosity, but one moreso looking for a one-on-one understanding of God. There is a great deal of subtle and transmogrified mythologizing--the traditional fables bowled over by reality, the high, idealistic hopes often stunted in birth by more rational and everyday life concerns. Kim, street-smart and wise before his time, is fascinated by the holy man's honesty and feels some compelling need to accompany the man on his random journies.
Kim is the story of two journies, certainly the holy man's as well as Kim's own, the reckoning with cultural identity and the east/west clash in a time of subterfuge and war. It is really a quite powerful story, dulled down at times by the author's seemingly ceaseless wonder, but for a tale marketed as being about a white European lost in the maze of turn-of-the-century India, there is a great deal that is very contemporary and an enormous amount of action and even betrayal.
Give it a go and read it to your kids. There are many valuable life lessons Kipling makes an attempt to teach and many wrong paths he explains to us all about taking.
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Title: Quest for Kim : In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk ISBN: 0472086340 Publisher: UMP Pub. Date: 07 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling ISBN: 0812504690 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 1992 List Price(USD): $2.99 |
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Title: The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk ISBN: 1568360223 Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Louis L. Cornell ISBN: 0192836293 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling ISBN: 0451523814 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: August, 1989 List Price(USD): $3.95 |
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