Scan barcode
aleinakay's review
3.0
The title is not the only similarity this book has with Sinclair's The Jungle. There are political similarities and so on (you know, socialism), but I think the thing that struck me most was just that basically everything that happens in this book is a major fucking bummer (to say the least).
vidumor's review against another edition
5.0
I have a lot of complex feelings about this one and I don't think I can express them clearly at the moment. It's just not common when my father recommends a book to me that he has also read in his youth. And it's rare for me to experience stories from my own country, that is written so well and poignantly, but also from a colonizer's writing. I know that I loved it, and I know that I have a lot of emotions about it. I will need a second read through to grasp it better though.
boronguyen's review
3.0
Themes asides, I don’t think Woolf (husband, but welllll…) is a good novelist
shobi's review
3.0
depressing event after depressing event after disturbing event <3 hinnihami queen
fionnualalirsdottir's review against another edition
There’s been a ferocious heat-wave where I live, with temperatures reaching degrees unheard of for decades. In a kind of sympathetic mirroring of such torrid days, my reading path took me from one blistering hot village in a jungle to another, from George Orwell’s Kyautada to Leonard Woolf’s Beddagama - in the heart of Ceylon, now Srilanka.
Both books were written in the early decades of the twentieth century and both are based on experiences gained by the authors while working as government agents in colonial outposts. Both authors show an awareness, unusual for the time, of the problems of British Imperialism. But the two books couldn’t be more different in how the themes are dealt with. Most people are familiar with Orwell’s [b:Burmese Days|1072932|Burmese Days|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360566162l/1072932._SY75_.jpg|1171545], set around the lives of a tiny white community in Kyautada in Burma and written in the tradition of Forster’s [b:A Passage to India|45195|A Passage to India|E.M. Forster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421883612l/45195._SY75_.jpg|4574850], or Conrad’s [b:Heart of Darkness|117837|Heart of Darkness|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317686353l/117837._SY75_.jpg|2877220], that is, almost entirely from the perspective of the coloniser.
Fewer readers have heard of Woolf’s tale of Sinhalese village life, told entirely from the point of view of the local villagers, and in a voice that sounds more like oral history than a written account by an outsider. [b:The Village in the Jungle|50204|The Village in the Jungle|Leonard Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347510886l/50204._SY75_.jpg|49051] is a particularly poetic telling, full of careful but beautiful word choices and a nice emphasis on the rhythm of the sentences. Many Sinhalese words are used, the author feeling no need to translate them, and those, along with the local names for the people and the places, add to the beauty and authenticity of the reading experience.
The book begins with a tribute to the jungle, to its animal life and its deities, the jungle as a place to be respected and feared:
All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama. If you climb one of the bare rocks that jut out of it, you will see the jungle stretched out below you for mile upon mile on all sides. It looks like a bare sea, over which the pitiless hot wind perpetually sends waves unbroken, except where the bare rocks, rising above it, show like dark smudges against the grey-green leaves...It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.
And so the scene is set, and the reader anticipates danger from the jungle, but before very long, it is people, and not only the village people themselves but those who come from outside, who prove to be the real danger.
The book raises a lot of questions about the laws of human society and the contrast with the laws of the jungle. It also questions whether a people can always live in their own place, never stepping outside of it, resistant to all change.
Woolf doesn’t offer any opinions, keeping to the facts of his story so that we, the readers, are forced to analyse the happenings of the tale for ourselves and to draw our own conclusions if we can. The skill he shows in creating a story that could pass for a genuine folktale is very admirable; I don’t know of any writer who has managed that feat before or since.
Leonard Woolf was married to Virginia Woolf, to whom he dedicated this story of jungle life: I’ve given you all the little that I’ve to give; you’ve given me all, that for me is all there is. So now I just give back what you have given - if there is anything to give in this.
According to Christopher Ondaatje, who wrote the afterword to this edition, Woolf, after writing this book and a small volume of short stories, gave up the idea of pursuing a career as a fiction writer, preferring to write more lucrative political and journalistic pamphlets which he published in the Hogarth Press, founded with his wife in 1917, as well as a five-part biography which he wrote in the sixties. Ondaatje concludes the afterword in this way: His own writings were inevitable overshadowed by the writer acknowledged to have been one of the two great modern innovators of the novel in English.
Ah, Joyce. My books often nod to each other from across the room.
Both books were written in the early decades of the twentieth century and both are based on experiences gained by the authors while working as government agents in colonial outposts. Both authors show an awareness, unusual for the time, of the problems of British Imperialism. But the two books couldn’t be more different in how the themes are dealt with. Most people are familiar with Orwell’s [b:Burmese Days|1072932|Burmese Days|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360566162l/1072932._SY75_.jpg|1171545], set around the lives of a tiny white community in Kyautada in Burma and written in the tradition of Forster’s [b:A Passage to India|45195|A Passage to India|E.M. Forster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421883612l/45195._SY75_.jpg|4574850], or Conrad’s [b:Heart of Darkness|117837|Heart of Darkness|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317686353l/117837._SY75_.jpg|2877220], that is, almost entirely from the perspective of the coloniser.
Fewer readers have heard of Woolf’s tale of Sinhalese village life, told entirely from the point of view of the local villagers, and in a voice that sounds more like oral history than a written account by an outsider. [b:The Village in the Jungle|50204|The Village in the Jungle|Leonard Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347510886l/50204._SY75_.jpg|49051] is a particularly poetic telling, full of careful but beautiful word choices and a nice emphasis on the rhythm of the sentences. Many Sinhalese words are used, the author feeling no need to translate them, and those, along with the local names for the people and the places, add to the beauty and authenticity of the reading experience.
The book begins with a tribute to the jungle, to its animal life and its deities, the jungle as a place to be respected and feared:
All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama. If you climb one of the bare rocks that jut out of it, you will see the jungle stretched out below you for mile upon mile on all sides. It looks like a bare sea, over which the pitiless hot wind perpetually sends waves unbroken, except where the bare rocks, rising above it, show like dark smudges against the grey-green leaves...It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.
And so the scene is set, and the reader anticipates danger from the jungle, but before very long, it is people, and not only the village people themselves but those who come from outside, who prove to be the real danger.
The book raises a lot of questions about the laws of human society and the contrast with the laws of the jungle. It also questions whether a people can always live in their own place, never stepping outside of it, resistant to all change.
Woolf doesn’t offer any opinions, keeping to the facts of his story so that we, the readers, are forced to analyse the happenings of the tale for ourselves and to draw our own conclusions if we can. The skill he shows in creating a story that could pass for a genuine folktale is very admirable; I don’t know of any writer who has managed that feat before or since.
Leonard Woolf was married to Virginia Woolf, to whom he dedicated this story of jungle life: I’ve given you all the little that I’ve to give; you’ve given me all, that for me is all there is. So now I just give back what you have given - if there is anything to give in this.
According to Christopher Ondaatje, who wrote the afterword to this edition, Woolf, after writing this book and a small volume of short stories, gave up the idea of pursuing a career as a fiction writer, preferring to write more lucrative political and journalistic pamphlets which he published in the Hogarth Press, founded with his wife in 1917, as well as a five-part biography which he wrote in the sixties. Ondaatje concludes the afterword in this way: His own writings were inevitable overshadowed by the writer acknowledged to have been one of the two great modern innovators of the novel in English.
Ah, Joyce. My books often nod to each other from across the room.
larissadistler's review
4.0
This was so interesting. Horribly depressing and a little terrifying, but very interesting.
I happened across this minor classic novel at work. It was chosen by my library director as a featured book for one of our newsletters. I never heard of it before, but she discovered that it was written by the husband of Virginia Wolfe. I was curious enough to read a bit more about the novel and discovered it was about colonial Sri Lanka and that Leonard wrote it after being a general in Ceylon for many years.
Early prose has an fascinating way of being disturbing with very little actual disturbing imagery. There are no sex scenes and the violence is much more understated than that found in novels today, but Leonard definitely makes his point. Life in the tiny jungle village is rough and if the higher ups, the Sri Lanken headman and his associates, didn't like you, then you were likely to starve. In years of poor crop yield disease is rampant in the weakened villagers and unless the headman is sympathetic to your family death abounds.
The jungle is described in enough detail with enough personification that it is a character itself. It comes across as an indiscriminate monster and savior alike. The real monsters are the people. Power and safety are difficult to come by and when one or the other is secured, anything will be done to keep it.
I really felt for the protagonists and even the antagonists when all is said and done. The story mostly chronicles the life of Silindu and his twin daughters. They are individuals with their own agendas to live peacefully with themselves and the jungle. The villagers decide they are pariahs and even demons and therefore life not even a finger to help them as they are plotted against over and over for the gains of others. The stories of his daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami, are heartbreaking in the way there lives are wasted at the expense of others.
This is not a story with a happy ending, but in the end it's clear that things keep moving regardless of the suffering of one village. This book really should be more well known. It's unique in the period which it was written as it is about the colonists and not the colonizers and it is sympathetic to the colonists giving them life and stories of their own.
I happened across this minor classic novel at work. It was chosen by my library director as a featured book for one of our newsletters. I never heard of it before, but she discovered that it was written by the husband of Virginia Wolfe. I was curious enough to read a bit more about the novel and discovered it was about colonial Sri Lanka and that Leonard wrote it after being a general in Ceylon for many years.
Early prose has an fascinating way of being disturbing with very little actual disturbing imagery. There are no sex scenes and the violence is much more understated than that found in novels today, but Leonard definitely makes his point. Life in the tiny jungle village is rough and if the higher ups, the Sri Lanken headman and his associates, didn't like you, then you were likely to starve. In years of poor crop yield disease is rampant in the weakened villagers and unless the headman is sympathetic to your family death abounds.
The jungle is described in enough detail with enough personification that it is a character itself. It comes across as an indiscriminate monster and savior alike. The real monsters are the people. Power and safety are difficult to come by and when one or the other is secured, anything will be done to keep it.
I really felt for the protagonists and even the antagonists when all is said and done. The story mostly chronicles the life of Silindu and his twin daughters. They are individuals with their own agendas to live peacefully with themselves and the jungle. The villagers decide they are pariahs and even demons and therefore life not even a finger to help them as they are plotted against over and over for the gains of others. The stories of his daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami, are heartbreaking in the way there lives are wasted at the expense of others.
This is not a story with a happy ending, but in the end it's clear that things keep moving regardless of the suffering of one village. This book really should be more well known. It's unique in the period which it was written as it is about the colonists and not the colonizers and it is sympathetic to the colonists giving them life and stories of their own.
soniapage's review against another edition
3.0
This short book reads almost like folklore. It is the story of a hunter and his family in colonial Ceylon - their struggles to survive the hardships of the jungle and abuse of neighbors. Told beautifully by Leonard Woolf (Virginia's husband) who had worked as a magistrate in Ceylon.
arunendro's review
dark
sad
medium-paced
3.5
depressing af but very interesting. I actually liked the short story at the end of this edition more than the novel.
omipotent's review
4.0
3.5 stars?
Hmmm this derives merit from the fact it's nothing like stories by today's standard. There is nothing to hope for the entire way through other than the mad buffalo dad "Appochchi". I came away with a dry taste in my mouth. Maybe because I've experienced these kinds of poor villages first hand? If you want to read about a poor village in a jungle in Sri Lanka in the early 1900s with a story of some kind then sure?
Hmmm this derives merit from the fact it's nothing like stories by today's standard. There is nothing to hope for the entire way through other than the mad buffalo dad "Appochchi". I came away with a dry taste in my mouth. Maybe because I've experienced these kinds of poor villages first hand? If you want to read about a poor village in a jungle in Sri Lanka in the early 1900s with a story of some kind then sure?
pbobrit's review
4.0
Not going to write too much as I'm be writing more about this soon for school, but this is a great book. Set in Ceylon it tells of the trials of a father raising his two daughters in a small village (in the jungle). Very well written, and sucks you in with it's language and believable characters. Leonard I believe was woefully under estimated as a writer of fiction and this book is a good example of his mastery of the craft.