Kim
"There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this."
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Kim (1901) is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, a Nobel-Prize winning English writer who was born in India and whose novels often deal with Indian themes. The eponymous protagonist in Kim is the impecunious orphan of an Irish soldier who finds himself in the streets of the Indian city of Lahore in the late nineteenth century after having lost both parents. Kim gradually becomes completely integrated in the Indian society with the only obstacle being his physical conspicuousness. His life of vagrancy pushes him to master Indian customs and Indian specificities more than the natives themselves. He lives mainly on begging money at times and doing petty jobs at other times. Later, Kim meets a Lama, or a Tibetan religious leader, and becomes his follower and disciple. He goes with the Lama for adventurous trips until one day a Christian chaplain recognizes him as British, separates him from the Lama and sends him to school. After graduation from school, Kim is expected to join the British government in its war against Russians. He also meets the Lama again and a sort of juxtaposition is set between the project of the war known as the Great Game and the Buddhist spiritual quest. Kim has to choose between the two opposing paths.
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.
