Kim
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- ¥100
発行者による作品情報
Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling set his final and most famous novel in the complex, mystery-shrouded India of the mid-nineteenth century where an exotic landscape teems with natives living under British colonial rule.
Kim, the poor orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in Lahore, straddles both worlds. Neither wholly British nor completely Indian, the young boy searches for his identity in the country where he was born; but at the same time, he struggles to create an identity for himself. Cunning and street wise, Kim is mature beyond his thirteen years and learns to move chameleon-like between the two cultures, becoming the disciple of a Tibetan monk while training as a spy for the British secret service.
Far above the average adventure story, Kim will captivate Kipling devotees as well as fans of tales brimming with foreign intrigue and treachery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kipling's inspirational poem the one that begins, "If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs" describes how to preserve one's honor by the principled avoidance of political and moral pitfalls. Italian artist Manna imagines the "you" of the poem as a boy journeying through a series of watercolor landscapes: fields under billowing clouds, misty nights, craggy mountaintops. To accompany the poem's first line, Manna paints the boy watching from a great green meadow as storm clouds approach; he stands and watches with a cool head, rather than running in fear. For "If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew/ To serve your turn long after they are gone," Manna shows the boy climbing a rocky pitch, the peaks of other mountains poking through the clouds below. Flying kites represent temptation, and dull-eyed marionettes represent allies who can't be trusted ("If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken/ Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools"). Though young readers may not fathom the poem's complexities, the grandeur of Manna's scenes conveys the loftiness of Kipling's sentiments. Ages 6 8.
