KIM, UN CAPOLAVORO DI FELICITA'
Kim è uno dei libri più felici che siano mai stati scritti da un uomo e uno dei miei libri preferiti.
Chi non l’ha letto non può avere un’idea della felicità di cui parlo. E il Ventesimo secolo (Kim è del 1901- un libro vecchio cent'anni) si apre con un inno alla vita, alla gioia che non ha eguali.
Non lo consiglierei a un giovane, nonostante the book is wrongly categorized as a children's book, because young people must learn to look at life with their own eyes, still full of radiance and in the morning. And 'the book of youth, not for youth. I would recommend it to who, along the way, lost enchantment, the old, the detecting, the lost. A Serb who in the depths of his heart a barren stalk that can still catch fire. He should go to Kim and her story.
It 's a first-rate book, as Edmund Wilson said, "where Kipling, more than any other in his book, his imagination left free to follow his memoirs and exploration." Wherever you lay eyes lively Kim, the Little Friend of All the World, flows a river of life. The lama as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim's bright eyes were wide open. The broad river of life was pleasant in his opinion, much more interesting than the narrow crowded streets of Lahore. There were new types and new shows with each step ... he knew that caste and caste to him unknown. We are in the look of Kim a lightness and vivacity fresh, for him there is no mystery that can not be revealed, there is no cross that can not be raised together, there is the dialect that can not be understood. The strength of the charge which his gaze is not due to the world but to himself. It does not matter the world, but his eyes to watch it. And the language to call it. If the world is awake, Kim, there is in the middle, more alert and impassioned as ever, "chewing a twig which then serve as a toothpick," as Kim takes her costumes everywhere in the country he knows and loves. Nobody knows why a little later, in the grip of an unconscious need, Kipling relies on little friend around the world in light of the terrible task of the Great Game Anglo-Russian rivalry. How to tell someone, many years after Kipling will prove still unrepentant in his autobiography for this choice. Kim, during the trip with the Lama in search of a sacred river, is enlisted in the regiment of father, and, impressed by its dual nature of English but also of "black as a coal indigenous" ("so was born a hundred years") hired him in the secret services. He goes to "Bobs" the details of a 'planned invasion by' five confederate kings, a conniving northern power, a Hindu banker in Peshawar, a factory of 'arms in Belgium and an independent Muslim principality in the South. " I read on the web: Kim - so full of what Le Carre called "tricks of the trade" - will have even greater significance because it will lead to the founding in 1904 - three years after its publication - the Indian secret service, quickly followed by MI6. Kim inspired even the birth of the U.S. Secret Service. Kipling's friend, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt - who had answered the 'call of Kipling's "bear the burden of' white man" by throwing his knights against the Cubans' English Empire - he used to call his son Kermit "Kim" and will then Kermit / Kim founded the Oss (Office of Strategic Services, later the CIA). One of its first director, Allen Dulles, always kept on the table a copy of Kim, who became one of the reference manuals of the CIA. Born as its creator in 1865, just eight years after the dramatic anti-British uprising of 1857, the character Kim is also the "cover story" of Kipling, his second hidden life. In the novel, the spy Kim refines the same qualities that the journalist / spy Rudyard was learning: the spirit of observation and attention to detail, as in "Kim's Game" (a classic game of observation). Both were just as many other indicators, an outsider who lived in two cultures. "
They lived in two cultures." Kim In no trace of this duality, because the author with a clever narrative structure gives the reader a wonderful cohesion to the whole, still included. As in a circle, the story ends there, where it was started, with no apparent pattern. His mother tells him in a dark windy autumn: You know you can not write a plot to save your soul. Even life and death here does not appear the two poles of existence, but intimately connected and blended. Tell a native in the story: "When I was fifteen, I had already killed a man and given birth to a son." As in a magic act.
The novel can be summed up because, as one critic said, Kim focuses on himself, with an incomparable happiness, every literary genre: the novel 's adventures, picaresque novel, novel travel, spy novel, a novel of initiation , mystical novel.
bed after several years, I can not help but look back on Kipling with Kim that offers its readers. Enchanting. It 'a look of understanding, curious, passionate, who knows the danger without escape, without knowing the evil bland. In the beautiful "simple stories of the hills," reads:
Throwing stone on each hand
From each well-ordered road we travel
And the whole world is wild and unknown.
For Kipling the world does not obey an order, but is on the brink of confusion and irresponsibility. What fascinated him, however, and he adapts his heart to the beat of the earth. And his call is noble and solemn, supportive, ecumenical.
My brother (so says Kabir)
Adora brass and stone as an infidel,
but in the voice of my brother
feel the same anguish of my heart.
Its God is the one that gave him the Fates ...
His prayer is that of every other man ... and mine.
Why Kipling reminds us every step of his work that the sky has its lofty wars, but the earth's wars trivial. So "who you beat the narrow way, between flashes of hell, to the day of Judgement, when the infidel Please be kind to the Buddha in Kamakura."