Kim

Front Cover
Rudyard Kipling, Edward W. Said
Penguin, 1989 - Juvenile Fiction - 365 pages
Two men - a boy who grows into early manhood and an old ascetic priest, the lama - are at the center of the novel. A quest faces them both. Born in India, Kim is nevertheless white, a sahib. While he wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism, he is also spiritually bound to the lama. His aim, as he moves chameleon-like through the two cultures, is to reconcile these opposing strands, while the lama searches for redemption from the Wheel of Life. A celebration of their friendship in a beautiful but often hostile environment, 'Kim' captures the opulence of India's exotic landscape, overlaid by the uneasy presence of the British Raj.

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About the author (1989)

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. During his time at the United Services College, he began to write poetry, privately publishing Schoolboy Lyrics in 1881. The following year he started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches, and poems —including "Mandalay," "Gunga Din," and "Danny Deever"—which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. While living in Vermont with his wife, an American, Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Kim—which became widely regarded as his greatest long work, putting him high among the chronicles of British expansion. Kipling returned to England in 1902, but he continued to travel widely and write, though he never enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. In 1907, he became the first British writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. He died in 1936

Edward W. Said is University Professor at Columbia, where he has taught English and Comparative Literature since 1963. His books include Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography; Beginnings; Intention and Method; The Question of Palestine; Literature and Society; The World, the Text and the Critic; Covering Islam; Orientalism; After the Last Sky; Blaming the Victim; Musical Elaborations; Culture and Imperialism; Representations of the Intellectual; Out of Place: A Memoir; The End of the Peace Process; Oslo and After and Peace and Its Dicontents: Gaza to Jericho 1993-1995.