Kim

Rating:
Summary: better than you're giving it credit for
Review: if you've taken remedial english classes all through school (or the parts of which you finished, at least), then you shouldnt be surprised when you're confused by words longer than 6 letters or those which havent been used for a couple hundred years or so. The plot's only boring if you don't pay attention, and hey- don't get mad 'cause kim went to school in the middle of the book- it's supposed to be somewhat like kiplings life ( read the short story Baa Baa Black sheep, you'll see ). it's not about a little british boy overcoming India either. there's nothing british about kim but his blood, and if you can't see past that, you're more racist than you accuse kipling of being. I loved the book. I found the plot adventurous, the protagonist easily likeable, and the vernacular not too confusing- for what it was (and I read it in my junior year of public high school). I also thought the characters weren't just stereotypes. (by the way, you shouldn't presume to know more about a culture you've never experienced than a writer who had spent his life immersed in it.) in short, if you have any sense of adventure, you'll be in love with this book. if, however, your eyes rarely leave the confines of this computer screen, the entire book may be a wholly foreign and confusing thing to you.

Rating:
Summary: If you're capable of thinking try this out.
Review: I first read this book-or tied to-when I was 10. Having already read "Nicholas Nickleby" and enjoyed it I hadn't expected "Kim" to be too hard. Halfway through the book I had to give up in disgust- it was too deep for me. Later on I came to love the book.It flung me into colonial India with all its native intrigue and wonder. We follow the journeys of an eleven year old boy,Kim or "Friend of all the World", a white brought up among the natives. We watch him travel around India with an old lama who becomes something like a fatherto KIm. The book is jam-packed with characters that will dazle you but that are still believable. People complain of the jargon Kipling uses; to me it was an added beauty, it made the atmosphere more tangible. Another thing I loved was the habit Kipling has of inserting verses before some chapters.At first you might not understand the relevance of the verse but the time you've finished the chapter you'll get it. This is a book that deserves to be respected, but also to be actally thought about, too.You have to have a certain amount of patience. Once you get over that, this book will enthrall you.

Rating:
Summary: a mild but quite thorough story of initiation:
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: If you're capable of thinking try this out.
Review: I first read this book-or tied to-when I was 10. Having already read "Nicholas Nickleby" and enjoyed it I hadn't expected "Kim" to be too hard. Halfway through the book I had to give up in disgust- it was too deep for me. Later on I came to love the book.It flung me into colonial India with all its native intrigue and wonder. We follow the journeys of an eleven year old boy,Kim or "Friend of all the World", a white brought up among the natives. We watch him travel around India with an old lama who becomes something like a fatherto KIm. The book is jam-packed with characters that will dazle you but that are still believable. People complain of the jargon Kipling uses; to me it was an added beauty, it made the atmosphere more tangible. Another thing I loved was the habit Kipling has of inserting verses before some chapters.At first you might not understand the relevance of the verse but the time you've finished the chapter you'll get it. This is a book that deserves to be respected, but also to be actally thought about, too.You have to have a certain amount of patience. Once you get over that, this book will enthrall you.

Rating:
Summary: Stunningly Overrated
Review: Am I missing something here? Apparently. I found Kipling's writing extremely stilted and archaic, in a bad way (not in a say, Shakespeare way). The characters were one-dimensional, and the plot was heaped with deus-ex-machinas. I had to struggle to get through every page, and force myself to read a designated amount each night in order to finish it (it took me almost a week, and it's not a long book). The writing is filled with colloquialisms and foreign expressions, and I had to constantly flip to the Endnotes to decipher the code, which was extremely inconvenient. I did learn something about India and its history, and I can't wait to read a better novel on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: A tug of war between Kipling's two minds
Review: Some say Kipling was an imperialist. Some say he was an Indophile. I think he was both at the same time. One Kipling was a polished and sophisticated part of the ruling class, the British. Another Kipling was a child, innocent of the artificial divisions of the society, fascinated by the color and splendour of the Jewel in the Crown, India. This novel at a subtle level, to me, represents a tug of war between the the two warring Kiplings. While the British elite Kipling is forced to believe in the good the Raj is doing to the poor rascals, the other Kipling has his doubts and frustrated by his inability to declare them freely, they find a veiled expression in Kim.
Kim is a Classic story of a boy's adventure in British India. There runs a background plot about "the great game", the spying war between the British and the Russian empires. Kim becomes a chain-man (spy) for the British and his native early years make him formidable in the profession. However more interesting is the other parallel story, that of friendship between Kim and a Tibetan lama and their wanderings together which also make this a road novel.
Kipling understands the oriental way of life and its philosophy. "Only chicken and Sahibs walk around without reason" he says. Through many such comments Kipling questions the western way of work, hurry and constant activity. As the lama says "to refrain from any action is best".
Lastly, one can not but wonder, how much Kim represents a fantacy of Kipling that he wanted to happen to himself. A few common facts between the story and Kipling's own life, for example his father's association with the Lahore Musuem, his own schooling experience etc are revealing. They almost make you hear Kipling sighing "I wish thus would have happened with me!"
Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A classic Raj era tale
Review: A classic Raj era tale

Rating:
Summary: A classic boy's adventure
Review: The tale is a classic adventure story, of Kim, Irish orphan growing up as a street urchin in northern India. It is a colourful picture of a short period in history when East and West met and were intertwined during the British Raj in India. Unromantic lefty dullards will go on about the imperialist tone of the book. But the book tells of an India so gloriously rich and diverse that the British are simply absorbed like conquerors before, one caste among hundreds: Moghuls, Brahmins and Sikhs, Pathans and Tibetans.

We are left in no illusions about the political realities of imperial India. We know that the white man is in charge, though they are shown to consist of fools like the Anglican chaplain as well as good men like Colonel Creighton. Like heroes such as Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings or Shasta in C S Lewis' A Horse and His Boy, Kim is always aware deep down (and it strengthens him even though at times he hates it) that he is set apart, of a nobler race, because he is a Sahib. Yet this seems perfectly natural in India, a land of myriad castes and classes, from high-born Brahmins to low, despised, Untouchables.

The characters are brilliant and amusing: Kim is such a lovable scamp ("You - you Od! Thy mother was married under a basket!") I find it hard to understand how anyone can fail to be immediately absorbed in his world and his fortunes. Hurree Babu and Mahbub Ali are likeable Indian characters. The Tibetan holy man, whom Kim follows as a disciple, portrayed in such a tender light that for all his scattiness one believes in his holiness, and we understand why Kim follows and loves him like a father.

But this is a boy's book, and the female characters are marginal and unsympathetically treated. Most will find the Indian slang and jargon tough going, unless they are willing to skim it over, and it is often necessary to keep a finger on the glossary at the end of the book. Nonetheless, beautifully written, and a Good Read.

Rating:
Summary: The original spy-kid.
Review: The orphaned son of a British Army officer learns the way of the streets of India, where he acts as a courier, and sometimes a spy, for locals who are in the pay of the British as spies, in their pursuit of the Great Game, in which the 19th century empires of Europe and Asia vie for control of India - the jewel-in-the crown of the British Empire.

At the age of thirteen, Kim befriends a Lama who is seeking a mystical river. Kim accompanies him on his search, and takes an important message to a British Officer regarding the nature of a white stallion's pedigree, which is really information about a tribal conspiracy. So Kim embarks upon an adventure which will lead him to his father's old regiment and his induction - after suitable testing - into the Great Game.

Not too much to do with the British Empire directly in terms of the Imperium and the underdog, the Indians with their tribal fiefdoms and a myriad of caste and religious divisions keeping the pot boiling well enough on their own. So there's not much jingoism evident.

I was struck by how much a couple of the characters resembled some of those by Fritz Leiber, and C.J. Cherryh. Kim was akin to Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser. And the old woman in the carriage reminded me of Illisidi from C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series.

I found the quality of the writing suffered from very abrupt changes in events, which required a couple of re-reads of many sections to get the hang of what had just happened. The most literary section was the one describing Kim and the Lama's trek through the mountains in the end section. The rest was to a good standard, but would have benefited from a more point-of-view style to keep things on a more even keel.

Rating:
Summary: Kipling's Kim and Komments on Kim
Review: Kim is a book that I had meant to read for nearly 20 years. When I finally got around to it, I first read the Amazon.com reviews and noted they seemed to divide into two camps. The first camp was overwhelmingly favorable; the other was guardedly favorable. The reviews that were guarded said, in the aggregate, that Kim was enjoyable for various reasons, but that it bore the baggage of racism and imperialism. For these and other reasons, Kim must be seen for what it really was. And there were some reviews were quite critical -- describing Kim as a plotless, meandering exercise in boredom.

The Kim that I read had a plot. A common plot. Those who have read Huckleberry Finn would recognize it. It is a coming of age novel placed about 130 years ago.

Imperialism and racism. Well, yes -- if you are viewing Kim from the viewpoint of a revisionist political commentator. Kim's India has a white ruling class and a darker skinned ruled class. This social structure is strikingly similar to the historical relationship between the British and the Indians during the Raj. And Kim is caught up in the Great Game, much like the historical Great Game. The British did want to continue to hold India from enemies foreign and domestic and Kim reflects that historical point of view. It was, after all, written during the Raj and within chronological shouting distance of the Game.

Racism. Yes. British characters, often presented in most unsympathetic ways, do have a racial stereotype of the Indians. And, the Indians have a racial stereotype of the sahibs. But the Indians are not what they want to seem to the British -- they are much, much deeper. Babu is a Babu -- if his mask is all the reader sees. Strikingly like real life.

When caught in the web of current social generalities, Kim is certainly a suspect tome. But Kim is literature. And, as literature, it is a tour de force of language and description and imagery of an India and a Raj long gone. Its main characters are all human and complex and the opposite of stereotyped. The interplay between the values and growth of the lama and the growth and experience of Kim is compelling and warming. When all is said and read, the lama has found his river in the only place it could be found. And Kim, I think, has found himself in the dust of an Indian plain ... an Indian in a Englishman's skin and an Englishman who has the gift of seeing himself as the Indian others see him.

If you are interested in India, pre- or post-Raj, do yourself a favor. Settle down with Kim and travel the Great Trunk Road, winter in Simla, and seek the River of the Arrow with your lama. Don't allow modern, political generalities deny you a wonderful adventure.