Kim

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Kim

  • ISBN13: 9780553213324
  • Condition: New
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Product Description
One of the fantastic adventure books of all time, Kim, first published in 1901, is Kipling’s last major work about India, a farewell look brimming with all the color and sound, dirt and splendor of that exotic land. Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, is a harmful worldly imp growing up in the walled city of Lahore. A secret mission for the British and a heartfelt bond with a Tibetan lama in search of a sacred river soon lead Kim into a life of spies and secrets, danger and high excitement. But Kim is more than a boy’s adventure. Written by the laureate of the British Empire, it is also a profound look at the differences between East and West. For the first time, a British writer understood India in all its complexity, mystery, and spirituality. Here we enter the harems; mingle with thieves, jugglers, and beggars; and experience all that is India in one of literature’s most magical and moving masterpieces.Amazon.com Review
One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O’Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father’s death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by inclination, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the tiny boys of the bazar; Kim was white–a poor white of the very poorest.

From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to judge that a fantastic destiny awaits him. The details, but, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman’s addled prophecies of “‘a fantastic Red Bull on a green meadow, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and’–dropping into English–’nine hundred devils.’”

In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing “commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion.” His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his “like of the game for its own sake,” makes him uniquely suited for a larger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain’s struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim’s friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling’s private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping excellent yarn to the level of a timeless classic. –Alix Wilber

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