I wish I could give this negative stars.

Makes me want to go visit India!

I am so late to this party that I am more of an anthropologist than a reporter. I finally understand why Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature. I was put off my his use of the word "native" for many years. Post-colonial theory only exacerbated my revulsion, especially in light of his poem "The White Man's Burden," (which does not really say what it seems to say, but that is not necessarily relevant for this review).
Julian Barnes, who is succinctly right about so many things, remarked, "What a curious vanity it is of the present to expect the past to suck up to it." I have winced my way through more than one nineteenth century author's misogyny and racism, so when I was stuck for a paperback in English while traveling in Sofia, I bought this at the marvelous Elephant Book Store. As I read, I saw two aspects of the novel to which I had been blind when I first picked it up. First is that critical race theory is more useful here than po-co, because it posits the social construction of race as the foundation for understanding, and Kipling's creation of Kim as both "white" by his Irish heritage and "Oriental" by upbringing problematizes easy categorizations of the central character. Since the plot arc concerns espionage, the slippage between the perceived and actual person is more than clever. Again and again, colonial hubris entraps British and Russian operatives, as the supposedly ignorant local people exercise their wills. I do not think the stereotype of the "wily Oriental" is being so much relied upon as questioned, because there are ignorant characters among all races and castes in the novel, and a British white man and a Hindu Indian man both share a secret, common desire to be published in scientific journals.
In fact, that is the second aspect of this novel that I had been oblivious to, namely the vast array of religions in this novel. Kim is agnostic, another sympathetic character Catholic (though he shies away from appending the label "Roman" to his faith), and other major influences are Hindu and Muslim. Kipling represents not only the named religions in India interacting tolerantly with each other, but he also overlays them all with both superstition and wisdom, depending on the penetration of the character in question. Thus the Muslim horse trader says, "Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law -- or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of all the World, and I love thee. So says my heart ... Therefore I say this matter of creeds is like the horses. Each has merit in his own country."
The most moving aspect of this is the exactitude with which Kipling recounts the Buddhist rituals of the "Red Lama" Kim follows. He accurately quotes the chants, something we still get wrong a hundred years later in the West, and he draws the old monk with humor, respect, and love. The exchange between this seeker and British museum curator is a model of humility. "We be craftsmen together, you and I," says the monk as he exchanges his own heavy, scratched spectacles for the curator's newer pair. The monk accepts them "as a sign of friendship between priest and priest" and in return, gives him his pen case. Kipling observes, "The curator would have detained him: they are few in the world who still have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures" -- and there are few people outside Buddhism who know that.
Finally, the story is adventurous and the writing beautiful. "The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it -- bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within earshot went to work. India was awake ..."
I loved this book, but I was not ready to read it before now. I had to see the world as a traveler before I could understand Kim, and Kipling.

A nice surprise, after having been left somewhat disappointed by Kipling’s short stories: a surprisingly enjoyable, wayward and complex novel this. Not really anti-imperialist, but still a kind of paean to the India Kipling grew up in. At the same time this tale of an English orphan passing for an Indian street urchin, living by his wits and finding surrogate fathers in, amongst other people, a Tibetan lama, a Pathan spy and an English spy handler seems to express a yearning for meaning and connection that reflects some of his own trauma on being left in England by his parents as a young child (as described in his short story ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’).

Excellent introduciton by Alan Sandison in this Oxford edition. Buyers of the e-book should beware that the OCR rendition of the text is less than perfect (some zeros and ones where there should be o'and l's, left out spaces, &C), although still on a par with the free versions around. And unfortunately something has gone wrong with the cross-referencing of the copious footnotes in the text, making them pretty well useless on an e-reader. The publisher ought really to have let someone look at this and remedy the problem.

brilliant. luved it.
My second or third reading and it always brings out the adventurer in me.
to be on the Road.

Wow, I finally finished! Some of it is that I have a newborn but the other half or I would say quarter was that is was just a harder read for me. The story line was somewhat interesting but not that entertaining. Also there were many, many, many footnotes or whatever they're called when they're in the back of the book. I read every one. Didn't need to. Really, some would just explain a region in India where a city was located. Still didn't know where it was. Anyway, there were some good passages, an endearing relationship with a lama and his chela (disciple) - yes this was one of the many hundred footnotes - and the story of this boy's development as an agent of the state. I don't need to read all brain candy but I sludged through this one.

I wish I liked this more but it just didn’t grab me. I’m sure it’s me, not the book. Read for BBC Top 200.

I did not expect to love this book as much as I did. I read it because the next Mary Russell book on my side table uses Kim as a jumping off point and I wanted to understand the allusions. It was definitely hard to get into at first but once I got a feel for the language and rhythm I didn't want to put it down. The story follows Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish officer in India who grows up in the bazaar with little supervision. He is a delightful mix of scoundrel and saint who becomes the chela, or disciple, for a traveling lhama. He is also seen as a prodigy in the Great Game of espionage in India and is trained up to become the best. It's a great adventure story with a cast of wonderful characters.

Kim isn't the Rudyard Kipling most people recall from their schooldays: the imperialist behind The White Man's Burden. Not having read anything other than The Jungle Book as a child (and of course seeing the Disney movie version many times, not to mention regularly watching the film version of another of Kipling's classics--one of my favorites--John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King with Sean Connery and Michael Caine), I was pleasantly surprised by his embrace of the many cultures and religions of the subcontinent. Clearly, Kim is the work of someone who loves India and her people. In particular, the respectful and clear way he explains Buddhism through one of the main characters is extraordinary for a book published primarily for young Western readers in 1901. It could almost be used in any Intro 101 class on campus today. However, I had two problems with this classic. One is Kipling's reliance on using "thees" and "thous" and other tricks to distinguish Hindi and Urdu vernacular from English; I found it very hard to follow who was speaking to whom at times. The other is the Great Game: for a novel that's supposedly one of the best about the "Cold War" between Great Britain and Russia in the 19th Century, there's very little of the Game in Kim. It's too bad there wasn't a sequel. It looks like we have to rely on modern authors like Mary Russell to imagine Kimball O'Hara as a grown man and spy for His Majesty's Government.