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318 reviews for:
Kim By Rudyard Kipling "Classic Annotated Edition" Adventure Fiction Novel
Rudyard Kipling
3.33 AVERAGE
318 reviews for:
Kim By Rudyard Kipling "Classic Annotated Edition" Adventure Fiction Novel
Rudyard Kipling
3.33 AVERAGE
I cannot express how much I loved this book. I have it in my que for so long and the espionage part of the description kept me from reading it. I am glad I did and it was the perfect timing in my life for it as well. I listened through audiobook. The Narrator was great and you could follow who was who and detailed, everything was great
adventurous
funny
slow-paced
This really captured India in the most true to life way. A bit hard to read given the language is from the olden days or whatever but once you relaxed into it it was just fun
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
slow-paced
Delightful. Unexpectedly so! This struck a chord with me.
I hesitated reading this since this is Kipling, and I assumed it would be dated colonialist claptrap. But not so! Quite something else. Though I am VERY curious to hear about the responses from these three groups of readers:
(1) Readers who don't speak Hindi/have never been to India/don't know much about India.
(2) Readers who DO speak Hindi/have spent time there, but aren't ethnically Indian.
(3) Readers who are ethnically Indian.
Plz let me know.
This book is very much in camp (2). Kipling was clearly in camp (2) - he spoke Hindi (or Hindustani/Urdu, at any rate), was born and lived in India/Pakistan for many years (quick wikipedia), and clearly was in love. I am, for better or worse, also very much in camp (2) - hence why this book struck such a chord. Dude. I loooove India. I lived there for 1 year, and then returned for 2- or 3-month trips for the next several years. I speak Hindi conversationally (सच!) and have tramped around it on the glorious Indian railway system - these are some of my fondest memories.
Kim - the titular protagonist - is also very much in camp (2). The orphaned child of an Irish colonial officer and some random other Euro lady (never got clarity on this), we meet him as a tween street scamp living in Lahore (present-day Pakistan). He is an extroverted lover of life, full of bonhomie and panache and brio and other French words for that vibe. He is excellent at code switching; or rather, he's completely culturally South Asian. One day in Lahore, he meets a wandering Tibetan lama. He has never met such an interesting person (someone from Tibet! and a lama, no less!) and immediately ingratiates himself and busies himself with guiding/helping the elderly mendicant.
And thus begins adventure 1. Because this is an adventure book, and it follows two adventures that periodically diverge and rendezvous throughout the subcontinent. Adventure 1 is: Kim attaching himself to the lama's side as his "chela" (Buddhist disciple) and helping him in his quest to find a mythical river (SOMEWHERE in India). Since tween Kim ain't got anything better to do, he is totally game to go wandering around such a very large area indeed - see new sights! Meet new people!
Adventure 2 - which I found a lot less interesting but I suppose could not be avoided - is Kim being (a) discovered as a "Sahib" (white guy), (b) getting the whole "son of a Sahib is a Sahib" sermon, i.e. being made to get properly educated at a fancy school in northern India somewhere (Dehradun?), and (c) getting pulled into the Great Game - aka the late 19th century diplomatic/intelligence war between Russia and the UK over central Asia (specifically Afghanistan). Kim is a feisty mischief-lover, and is multi-lingual to boot, so being enlisted as a teen spy by similarly-fluidly-code-switching Britishers and South Asians is totally his most optimal career path. But I, dear reader, found it a little less enchanting than wandering around with the Tibetan lama listening to Buddhist sermons and meeting interesting people. (And I hasten to add that adventure 2 is not as corny as I'm making it sound; it felt legitimately believable and was mildly thrilling in its 19th century espionage intrigue.)
Kipling's portrayal of race and culture is: he clearly celebrates Kim. And he celebrates all the characters who can navigate multiple cultural worlds fluidly and passionately: the lama, Colonel Creighton (the chief British spymaster), Hurree Babu (the Bengali middle management spy), and - to an extent - Mahbub Ali (the Pashtun horse-trader spy). Kipling excoriates several clearly racist, ignorant characters: the idiotic British schoolboy that Kim loathes, the Russian spies, even the well-meaning-ish Anglican minister. Basically, anyone who is rigidly "apart", who is mono-lingual and holds themselves "above", is - in this story - absolutely destroyed. There's a cringing schadenfreude in watching these characters get, well, their just comeuppance. I'm thinking especially of the Russian spies, ignorantly wandering through Himachal Pradesh while a network of village gossip is tracking their every move and colluding with Kim and his team on whether and how to help them. Kipling is clearly a fan of the big melting pot. (Which is why his poem, "The White Man's Burden", is so confusing: "East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet" - this entire book is celebrating that meeting!?)
The stuff I found problematic was the perpetuation of those regional stereotypes - e.g. macho Pathans and effete, intellectual Bengalis - which I read somewhere (citation needed!) were largely an invention of the British anyway. At least, I *loved* Hurree Babu, and was like, "stop calling yourself a coward, you're awesome." I also found the dated terms and confident generalizations - Kipling regularly refers to "Asiatic" and "Oriental traits" - jarring. Even if they were, for the most part, flattering: take it easy and be flexible, the "Eastern way"!?
Oh yes, and the pre-Sahibized travels with the lama, when Kim and the lama take the train from Lahore to Pathankot and wander around northern India for a while, to places I've been to, made my heart sing. It was so fascinating to see this window into quotidian 19th century India, and to see what's changed and what hasn't. And the long digressions on Buddhism was *chef's kiss*. Why are there not more adventure books set in India featuring kindly, quirky lamas!?
I hesitated reading this since this is Kipling, and I assumed it would be dated colonialist claptrap. But not so! Quite something else. Though I am VERY curious to hear about the responses from these three groups of readers:
(1) Readers who don't speak Hindi/have never been to India/don't know much about India.
(2) Readers who DO speak Hindi/have spent time there, but aren't ethnically Indian.
(3) Readers who are ethnically Indian.
Plz let me know.
This book is very much in camp (2). Kipling was clearly in camp (2) - he spoke Hindi (or Hindustani/Urdu, at any rate), was born and lived in India/Pakistan for many years (quick wikipedia), and clearly was in love. I am, for better or worse, also very much in camp (2) - hence why this book struck such a chord. Dude. I loooove India. I lived there for 1 year, and then returned for 2- or 3-month trips for the next several years. I speak Hindi conversationally (सच!) and have tramped around it on the glorious Indian railway system - these are some of my fondest memories.
Kim - the titular protagonist - is also very much in camp (2). The orphaned child of an Irish colonial officer and some random other Euro lady (never got clarity on this), we meet him as a tween street scamp living in Lahore (present-day Pakistan). He is an extroverted lover of life, full of bonhomie and panache and brio and other French words for that vibe. He is excellent at code switching; or rather, he's completely culturally South Asian. One day in Lahore, he meets a wandering Tibetan lama. He has never met such an interesting person (someone from Tibet! and a lama, no less!) and immediately ingratiates himself and busies himself with guiding/helping the elderly mendicant.
And thus begins adventure 1. Because this is an adventure book, and it follows two adventures that periodically diverge and rendezvous throughout the subcontinent. Adventure 1 is: Kim attaching himself to the lama's side as his "chela" (Buddhist disciple) and helping him in his quest to find a mythical river (SOMEWHERE in India). Since tween Kim ain't got anything better to do, he is totally game to go wandering around such a very large area indeed - see new sights! Meet new people!
Adventure 2 - which I found a lot less interesting but I suppose could not be avoided - is Kim being (a) discovered as a "Sahib" (white guy), (b) getting the whole "son of a Sahib is a Sahib" sermon, i.e. being made to get properly educated at a fancy school in northern India somewhere (Dehradun?), and (c) getting pulled into the Great Game - aka the late 19th century diplomatic/intelligence war between Russia and the UK over central Asia (specifically Afghanistan). Kim is a feisty mischief-lover, and is multi-lingual to boot, so being enlisted as a teen spy by similarly-fluidly-code-switching Britishers and South Asians is totally his most optimal career path. But I, dear reader, found it a little less enchanting than wandering around with the Tibetan lama listening to Buddhist sermons and meeting interesting people. (And I hasten to add that adventure 2 is not as corny as I'm making it sound; it felt legitimately believable and was mildly thrilling in its 19th century espionage intrigue.)
Kipling's portrayal of race and culture is: he clearly celebrates Kim. And he celebrates all the characters who can navigate multiple cultural worlds fluidly and passionately: the lama, Colonel Creighton (the chief British spymaster), Hurree Babu (the Bengali middle management spy), and - to an extent - Mahbub Ali (the Pashtun horse-trader spy). Kipling excoriates several clearly racist, ignorant characters: the idiotic British schoolboy that Kim loathes, the Russian spies, even the well-meaning-ish Anglican minister. Basically, anyone who is rigidly "apart", who is mono-lingual and holds themselves "above", is - in this story - absolutely destroyed. There's a cringing schadenfreude in watching these characters get, well, their just comeuppance. I'm thinking especially of the Russian spies, ignorantly wandering through Himachal Pradesh while a network of village gossip is tracking their every move and colluding with Kim and his team on whether and how to help them. Kipling is clearly a fan of the big melting pot. (Which is why his poem, "The White Man's Burden", is so confusing: "East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet" - this entire book is celebrating that meeting!?)
The stuff I found problematic was the perpetuation of those regional stereotypes - e.g. macho Pathans and effete, intellectual Bengalis - which I read somewhere (citation needed!) were largely an invention of the British anyway. At least, I *loved* Hurree Babu, and was like, "stop calling yourself a coward, you're awesome." I also found the dated terms and confident generalizations - Kipling regularly refers to "Asiatic" and "Oriental traits" - jarring. Even if they were, for the most part, flattering: take it easy and be flexible, the "Eastern way"!?
Oh yes, and the pre-Sahibized travels with the lama, when Kim and the lama take the train from Lahore to Pathankot and wander around northern India for a while, to places I've been to, made my heart sing. It was so fascinating to see this window into quotidian 19th century India, and to see what's changed and what hasn't. And the long digressions on Buddhism was *chef's kiss*. Why are there not more adventure books set in India featuring kindly, quirky lamas!?
Putting issues of imperialism and race aside, Kim is a wonderfully told story about a rascally boy searching for his own racial and cultural identity. Kipling has a storyteller's way with words and a deep affection for all of his characters and the country in which they roam.
I had a history teacher in high school whose parents named him after the protagonist in this book, and I guess it turned out to be a fitting name, for he too is a rascal. I had him for history twice, once when I was a freshman, and once when I was a senior, and I also had him for psychology. Dude is smart. He went to Harvard. It's totally not his fault that I used to fall asleep in his class, even when I was sitting in the front row. His voice was so soothing! But he was cool about it. Instead of being a dick, he just gave me a stupid nickname. The kid who sat next to me got one too. His real name was Nick, but together we were Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. I think I was Dum. Also when we weren't falling asleep (or paying attention), we took turns "going to bathroom," which mostly consisted of doing laps around the building just for the fun of it.
Good trip down memory lane, Ashley.
I had a history teacher in high school whose parents named him after the protagonist in this book, and I guess it turned out to be a fitting name, for he too is a rascal. I had him for history twice, once when I was a freshman, and once when I was a senior, and I also had him for psychology. Dude is smart. He went to Harvard. It's totally not his fault that I used to fall asleep in his class, even when I was sitting in the front row. His voice was so soothing! But he was cool about it. Instead of being a dick, he just gave me a stupid nickname. The kid who sat next to me got one too. His real name was Nick, but together we were Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. I think I was Dum. Also when we weren't falling asleep (or paying attention), we took turns "going to bathroom," which mostly consisted of doing laps around the building just for the fun of it.
Good trip down memory lane, Ashley.
Trigger warning - racial slurs
I wasn't sure what to expect going into Kim but I did enjoy what I got. This is a great story about a boy coming into his own. It is steeped in religion with the tiniest hint of politics. As always I loved Rudyard Kipling's flowing narrative but this story didn't stick quite as well as his other books. I sill really enjoyed this book though.
I wasn't sure what to expect going into Kim but I did enjoy what I got. This is a great story about a boy coming into his own. It is steeped in religion with the tiniest hint of politics. As always I loved Rudyard Kipling's flowing narrative but this story didn't stick quite as well as his other books. I sill really enjoyed this book though.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
slow-paced
Maybe 3.5. I found this a very interesting read, dealing with a really fascinating moment in history and with a lot of great themes. I did find it a little hard to follow in places, but overall it was an enjoyable and interesting novel.