Appearance
Kim
Good story. Some issues with spelling mistakes and garbled characters on my Kindle but not bad. Pictures came out good.
Kim
My book club read Kim because none of us had ever read any Kipling and one of the members had heard that Kim was the Kipling to read. I did not approach the book with high expectations and expected to find the language archaic, imperialist and racist (the white man's burden, etc.). I was completely swept away by the beauty of this book and Kim's journey of the spirit and identity. Wonderful characters, great insight into the sea of humanity that is India, great respect shown to people of all faiths with Kim cast as the Friend of All the World. I highly recommend this book.
Kim
Kipling's novel marks the advent of that most twentieth-century--and, some critics might argue, British--of genres: the spy thriller. At the same time, it is a pre-Forster and pre-Narayan peek at an exotic (to Europeans) and magical (if often idealized) colonial India, prophetic in its introduction of Indian lives to Western eyes. But, above all, it is an exemplar of late Victorian bildungsroman, the story of a young man's quest, torn not only between two cultures but also between the callings of the spirit and the demands of the world.Not incidentally, I was led to my reading of Kipling via scholarly studies of the works of Conrad, and "Kim" straddles the line between Dickensian mirth and Conradian realism, between romance and cynicism. The novel is better, I think, in its former guise: more convincing in the outsized characters it portrays than with the socio-political plot it weaves. Especially memorable are such characters as the oblivious but incorrigibly hallowed Teshoo Lama; the "iron-willed" Sahiba, known for "her failings, her tongue, and her large charity"; the patron-spy Mahbub Ali, who takes Kim under his wing; and the sorceress Huneefa, who accepts fees for "all sorts of exorcisms." At the other end of the likeability spectrum is Father Bennett, a Church of England chaplain who peddles a "creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of `heathen.'"Although some readers (especially young readers) have a hard time slogging through Kipling's occasionally elliptical prose and the formal archaisms with which he renders the speech of his native characters, I nevertheless wished I had read this as a teenager. At times, the novel recalls the popular adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson, which I also loved as a kid far more than I do now. Of course, one can't fault Kipling for building a bridge between the literary aims of nineteenth-century romance with those of twentieth-century realism, but his unique yet disorienting hybrid requires a suspension of belief that is a little hard to achieve as an adult. "Kim" is far more compelling for the fantasy it creates than for the reality it depicts.
Kim
The son of an Irish soldier is orphaned in 1800s India and instead of living in an orphanage or British military school he opts to live as a street urchin going on wild adventures mainly with a Tibetan Llama in search of a sacred river. Kipling lived in India for several years and was familiar with the landscape and cultures of India so he does a good job of painting a vivid picture of the place and time. Overall this was a fun book to read.
Kim
A brief, gorgeous and kaleidoscopic picture of the "great game" in northern India. Interesting to read at the moment that India and Pakistan were engaging in the same great game on the same soil, with Pakistanis hijacking an Indian place to Afghanistan.Mom was wrong, I think, to treat Kim's whiteness as a minor betrayal by Kipling of his material -- a retreat from the more wholly Indian story he wanted to write. The whiteness is central to Kim -- Kim is like Leatherstocking a "man without a cross."
Kim
The Recorded Book (unabridged version)was my companion on a cross-country drive. The story was so compelling I had to turn it off whenever the traffic was heavy. The book was full of generous-hearted people from different backgrounds, each making his own search, each trying to live up to his idea of the good. The book also gave a vivid picture of India during the British occupation. This book is truly a classic.