Word: godden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...UNDER THE INDIAN SUN by Jon and Rumer Godden. 240 pages. Knopf, Viking...
Fifty years ago, eight-year-old Rumer Godden began to write a novel. "Peggy," read one memorable sentence, "looked round and saw a tigiger and a loin roring...
...Godden sisters are now successful British novelists, and when Rumer (Black Narcissus, The River) and Jon (The Seven Islands, The Peacock) use India as a locale, reality still does not impinge on the writing. Seen through their eyes, the vast Asian subcontinent becomes a setting instead of a place, muddy rivers are transformed into revered waters, reeking slums smell of curry and spice, and lacerating poverty is unflinchingly accepted...
This collaborative childhood autobiography evokes dreamy days in a sprawling house in East Bengal, where the Goddens' father was a steamship agent, and where, as petted and pampered little memsahibs, they had syces to care for their pony, dirzees to whip them up frilly frocks, ayahs and bearers to care for them. But the sisters were perceptive little girls, and if life was mostly a carefree and sheltered idyll, there was also an awareness of spuming life outside their garden wall. They recall with remarkable clarity the sights and sounds of the bazaars, of steamer trips through the river...
...this lushly produced, smoothly vulgarized adaptation of a 1963 novel by Rumer Godden, effusions like "binding, inescapable, unforgettable" are as common as teacups at a Wednesday bridge luncheon. But breathless rhetoric apparently is the norm for sensible English matrons who desert home and family to live in guilty splendor with pianists on the shores of Italy's Lago di Garda. Maureen and Rossano have no sooner snuggled into his sumptuous Villa Fiorita than her pint-sized son and daughter (Martin Stephens, Elizabeth Dear) arrive. They have paid their fare to Italy by selling the girl's pet pony...