Kim (Eesti Päevalehe romaaniklassika, #11)

Kim , 13, a lonely, British orphan boy, born in India, his widowed father, was in Queen Victoria's army, but he died, a hopeless, pathetic, drunk. Kim's full name is Kimball O'Hara, the poorest of the poor, who lives mostly, in the slum streets of Lahore, the Punjab (now part of Pakistan). Sometimes the child, stays with an old Indian woman, addicted to opium, naturally, he prefers the outside, begging for money, trying to stay alive and surviving, day to day Later meeting a strange Lama, from f [...]

IL RAGAZZO CHE NON VOLLE FARSI RE Romanzo per ragazzi, e per adulti. Lettura per tutti.Romanzo picaresco, quindi d’avventura, di viaggio. Ma anche romanzo di spionaggio, racconto mistico, d’iniziazione…Romanzo intriso di speranza, di fiducia nella possibilità, un inno alla gioia: è gioia leggerlo e gioia è quella che comunica e trasmette.Il suo nome completo è Kimball O’Hara: è l’orfano di un sergente irlandese che ha sposato in India la governante della famiglia di un colonnello [...]

Although somewhat drowned in Orientalist ideals and British colonialism, Kim is an exciting tale of espionage and adventure for kids of all ages 9 to 99. It is an exciting read. I just with that Kipling had been a little less bigoted towards the Empire. Nonetheless, probably the peak of his writing for children at least in terms of character and plot development and complexity.

Kim served as inspiration for my novel "The Game", the seventh entry in the Mary Russell series. Feel free to come and join in the discussion, even if you come across this after December has passed--the discussion will remain open indefinitely for new thoughts and comments. Click for more information about the Virtual Book ClubOh, this is such a wonderful book. Coming-of-age tale and historical treatise; spy thriller and travel narrative; rousing adventure coupled with a sleek and subtle tale of [...]

“There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.” ― Rudyard Kipling, KimThis is one of those novels that I read and instantly regreted not reading earlier when I was a boy. I was able, however, to experience reading this with my two kids (one boy 12; one girl 11). It was perfect. I wandered into it expecting a well-written, more or less Empire-centric Colonial novel. It was way more than that. I get the whole Postcolonial Lit thing, but I'm not ready to abandon Kim to this debate or [...]

This coming of age tale had a lot of charm in many spots, but too often was a bit slow for my tastes. Kim O’Hara is a 12-year old orphan in Lahore in the 1850’s, child of an Irish soldier and Indian mother. Despite the loss of both parents he thrives well as a street urchin, always finding a way to make himself useful to community members or to engage sympathy from strangers and thus able to earn or beg his daily keep. His life opens up when he assists a Tibetan lama on a pilgrimage and join [...]

While it is one of the most beautiful tales of friendship I have ever read, Kim is much more. Rudyard Kipling created in Kim a novel in the mold of the classic heroic journey that has a pedigree reaching back to Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. With Kim, a young white boy, sahib, at it's center and his friend and mentor the Lama, we see the world of India in the nineteenth century as it is ruled by Great Britain. The story unfolds against the backdrop of The Great Game, the political conflict between [...]

Single Quote Review:It was all there in Kipling, barring the epilogue of the Indian inheritance. A journey to India was not really necessary. No writer was more honest or accurate; no writer was more revealing of himself and his society. He has left us Anglo-India; to people these relics of the Raj we have only to read him. We find a people conscious of their roles, conscious of their power and separateness, yet at the same time fearful of expressing their delight at their situation: they are al [...]

You know those books that you know from the very first page, you’re going to love it… this wasn’t that. You know those other books that start out slow and it takes you awhile, but soon you find yourself hooked? Nope, this was not one of those either. In fact, I made it through the entire book without every really feeling invested in any way, shape or form. I persevered only because I started it a few months ago and gave it up, then restarted it, convinced I’d get through it. It’s one o [...]

“We'd go down to the river And into the river we'd dive Oh down to the river we'd ride”That’s Bruce Springsteen, not Rudyard Kipling. All the mentions of The River just reminds me of this song.So Kim is all about the adventures of a young Irish boy, Kimball O'Hara, in British colonial India. Kim starts off as a Tom Sawyer-ish, or Bart Simpson-esq, little scamp. One day he encounters an elderly Tibetan Lama and volunteers to become his disciple in order to go adventuring on the monk’s pil [...]

One of the best books I've ever read, and one that I'm sure will stick with me for a long, long time. Not to say it's always an easy book. For one, it's pretty colonial-feeling, what with its fondness for dropping the n-word on anyone browner than an Englishman, its blithe references to sneaky, inconstant "orientals," and so forth - so much so that it's distracting and jarring in a few places. As a 21st century reader, it took me some mental effort to get past that casual matter-of-fact racist l [...]

It’s been a long time since I’ve graduated law school, a longer time for college, and a million years (give or take a year) since high school. That means it’s been a long time since I’ve been forced to read a particular book. I’ve always loved to read. And I’ve always hated assigned reading. I’ve despised books I’d otherwise enjoy simply because I’m told to read it on a deadline and feel a particular intellectual response. So, ever since my last diploma, I’ve been reading wha [...]

Even though I share the name of the hero of this novel, I've chosen not to read it until now. There's more than one reason for this. The main reason is that I'm not naturally drawn to picaresque novels or to espionage novels, even though I've read my fair share of books from both genres. I've also had an instinctively negative reaction to Kipling because of my not terribly well-informed view of him as an apologist for British imperialism. However, in the last few days I've started reading the se [...]

ETA: Ooops, I misspelled lama, using instead the spelling for the fuzzy animal sort, which IS spelled llama! ;0) Thanks Kim for telling me!You CAN listen to a Librivox audiobook in the car. I have now discovered that you should click on the download buttons found next to each chapter visible in the Librivox app. You must click on all of them. If you don't click on each chapter's download button, you need wifi to listen when using the app. In the car you also must use an AUX jack. Leslie and Greg [...]

Not for the first time – I was lucky enough to overstep (almost by accident) some stray prejudice and discover how wrong I was. For most of my life Kipling has been the onerous author of "If" – a poem I was forced to recite as a boy and which still makes me shudder. Of course I've known of his other books, including Kim, which I regarded as surviving in a dubious space somewhere between Disney and Edward Said's condemned Orientalists. It was only after making my way through Peter Hopkirk's T [...]

As I said of another classic adventure story of The Great Game, the East is a fantasy. This is not only true for writers like Mundy, who experienced it as an outsider, or Howard, who experienced it only through books--it's also true for those who, like Kipling, were born and raised there.Indeed, many of our most cherished fantasies tend to relate to the place we were born--when we find ourselves defending it, or singing its praises. It's not that the details we give aren't true, it's that we hav [...]

Kim, or Kimball O’ Hara, is a British boy who has grown up on the streets of Lahore at the height of British rule in India. He lives like a native Indian, speaks Hindi fluently and knows the city like the back of his hand. Immensely street-wise, he makes a living by carrying messages for all kinds of people including an Afghan horse-dealer called Mahbub Ali who is himself involved in espionage on behalf of the British government. Kim’s ability to be part of more than one community makes him [...]

My thoughts are that this was not (to me), a very interesting book. It lacked, for lack of a better word an important emotional piece and that would be the absence of a female protagonist. While I did admire the friendship and love/admiration piece that Kim and the llama shared between them, I did find the actual story to be dull and uninteresting. Sorry to say after having read a number of books on India, this particular novel fell short for me on the impact it had on my reading and understandi [...]

THAT. WAS. FLIPPING. AWESOME. Rtc. Hopefully.

Andrò controcorrente ma, per quanto mi riguarda, è un romanzo altamente sopravvalutato.Sarà che non riesco mai a sentirmi a mio agio con l'India, sarà che la storia di un accattone non stimola il mio interesse, ma Kim ha rasentato l'illegibilità.Se persino la breve nota introduttiva lo definisce un "romanzo senza trama" allora ringrazio di averla letta al termine di questo estenuante e incongruo viaggio.Molto da dire non c'è, le prime cento pagine sono praticamente illeggibili, infarcite d [...]

"This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it."This is one of those books at the center of the academic street fight known as postcolonial studies. On one hand, Rudyard Kipling was a great (and Nobel Prize-winning) writer; on the other hand, he was an unabashed cheerleader of British and American imperialism. I wanted to read Kim, in fact, because Edward Said had so much to say about it (both good and bad) in Culture and Imperialism. Politics aside, though, [...]

Most people the age of 20 or better have read Kim by Rudyard Kipling. I just finished the novel and already regret not having read it before. The story is a magnificent adventure of epic proportions crossing the continent of India into Tibet. Kim, 11, and an orphan, has the run of the streets in Lahore and has garnered respect of the good and bad. Early in the story Kim befriends a Holy One, Teshoo Lama, and becomes the Lama’s chela or servant. In search of Kim’s destiny and the Lamas Holy R [...]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the labelEssay #51: Kim (1901), by Rudyard KiplingThe story in a nutshell:Rudyard Kipling has taken a big hit in reputation since the rise of Postmodernism in the post-colonial pe [...]

I read Rudyard Kipling's Kim after reading Laurie King's The Game, a Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell mystery in which an adult Kim plays a major role. In Kipling's Kim, Kim is a savvy Irish child who was born in India; raised by a half-caste, opium-smoking woman after his parents died; and ran wild and curious in the subsequent years. At 13, he met up with his father's regiment, became a disciple to a lama, and joined the spy trade. I could read this story in several ways: as a light-hearted advent [...]

Kipling is a controversial author these days, seen as an unapologetic imperialist booster of the British Empire and even racist. Yet Indian authors such as Arundhati Roy, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie have found Kipling impressive and even influential. Kipling can be a wonderful storyteller. Rushdie has said Kipling's writing has "the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance." I found that the case in both The Jungle Books and now Kim. And yes, you can see a, shall we say, very un-PC [...]

So let's just put on the back burner the fact that Kipling was a real a-hole in real life. He was, but I'm here to discuss his writing so that's what I'll do.The title character, Kim, is not indeed Indian. That was the biggest preconceived notion I had. He was not Indian. He was the orphan son of an Irish soldier who had been stationed outside of India, and a poor woman. Kim lives a life similar to one as seen in the Disney version of Aladdin (now I'm really mixing things up) - begging, doing od [...]

"Chela, hast thou never a wish to leave me?""No," he said almost sternly. "I am not a dog or a snake to bite when I have learned to love".Kim non è un romanzo semplice da definire. È prima di tutto una grandissima testimonianza dell'imperialismo britannico in India, e in secondo luogo una delle più belle storie di amicizia che abbia mai letto. Il senso del romanzo sta probabilmente nell'essere ibrido di Kim: il giovane protagonista non è né bianco né nero, né inglese né indiano. Kim racc [...]

I decided that before reading Laurie R. King's The Game again, I should read Rudyard Kipling's Kim, as King calls The Game "a humble and profoundly felt homage" to Kim. Besides, I'd never read it, and it's one of those classics I felt I should get around to someday. Kimball O'Hara is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier who was stationed in India; when his father died, Kim was raised by a half-caste woman and learned to live on the streets of Lahore. The story begins when Kim meets a Tibetan lam [...]

+Reto Popsugar 2016 - #33: Clásico del siglo XX+Coming-of-age story about an irish orphan raised in Imperial India, a picaresque kind of novel of this 13 year old boy curious as a cat, full of wit, and adverse to school and work. Helping a lama because is something new, and playing a dangerous game is like Kipling paint this exotic land through his eyes.—Los sahibs no disfrutan de los viajes —reflexionó—. ¡Hai mai!, voy de un sitio a otro como si fuera una pelota. Es mi kismet. Nadie pu [...]

I had a bit of trouble focusing, especially at the beginning of the book because of the language style. It picked up around page 75 or so. The ending was a bit anticlimactic, but the book itself was fantastic and hilarious. I don't really understand how Kipling is portrayed today as an imperial jingoist - if anything, he has far more of a "people are people" approach than anyone I've read of his era and probably most contemporary writers. The gist of everything is that people are people and Indi [...]