Word: goddens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MOOLTIKI: STORIES AND POEMS FROM INDIA (151 pp.)-Rumer Godden-Viking...
This charming book consists of impressionistic sketches of the sprawling Asian subcontinent done in the pale pastel shades of life rather than its raw primary colors. Filtered through Author (Black Narcissus) Godden's genteel mem-sahib vision, India becomes a setting instead of a place, Hindus and Moslems become figures in a tapestry instead of people, and life moves to the lute strings of poetry instead of the purse strings of necessity. As a free versifier, Author Godden ranks somewhat below another run-of-the-pagoda poet, Emperor Hirohito...
...elephants. She rumbles and grumbles audibly while stoking the mighty campfire with logs. She would rather blow bubbles in the river or clutch a flower in her trunk than be a proper beast of burden. Around Mooltiki's plotless existence revolve a skin-prickling tiger hunt and Author Godden's evocations of the lush tropical fecundities of Indian jungle country. Rumer Godden is a fastidious craftsman but a trifle hammy. Some of her sentences preen themselves so long before the mirror of sensibility that, like Mooltiki, they never quite carry their weight in sense...
...hands of such latter-day practitioners as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, the tale became a highly sophisticated means of telling a story that would not be believable if told in any other tone of voice. In The Seven Islands, Novelist Jon (The House by the Sea) Godden makes the unbelievable believable by spinning with quiet skill a stately little tale about India and hanging from its frail threads the weight of an ancient way of life...
...Author Godden, sister of Novelist Rumer (An Episode of Sparrows) Godden, has told her tale with the simplicity of a fable, leaving her readers to probe for themselves the depths she merely suggests. Few will be persuaded by the tale's fatalism, but many may be intrigued by its mystical conception of the path to truth...