Plain Tales from the Hills (Penguin Classics) by Rudyard Kipling (EPUB)

Description

Originally written for the “Lahore Civil and Military Gazette”, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling’s stories tell of ‘heat and bewilderment and wasted effort and broken faith’. He writes brilliantly and hauntingly about the barriers between the races, the classes and the sexes; and about innocence, not transformed into experience but implacably crushed.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author 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

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I bought this book to recall the halcyon days of my secondary schooling in the years 1957 – 61. Then the book was an assigned text for all students in English in New Zealand. The language and the concepts were then frankly beyond the comprehension of 15 year olds. As I grew older, I became aware of the position Kipling held in the Late Victorian era, and the period following the end of the First World War.I came to understand a little of what the British Empire meant in those times, and the great debt owed by the world to the British Army which subdued Iraq, Pakistan, and the Indian Continent for almost 200 years.Without the benefit of the bomb, with a tiny armed service, and a desire to provide fair and equitable government, the Raj governed fearlessly through the efforts of the thirds sons of many of the great English Families, while the fourth sons provided the humanity of the Church. Patterns we could well emulate again today!This was bread and butter to Kipling. In his early years as a huge supporter of the system, as a spiritualist after the death of his son in the First World War, and in his later years as the designer of the huge Military Cemetaries established in France and Belgium after the War to the Empire’s dead, he truly became in his own words a “Builder of the Silent Cities”.In 2006, the concepts of his writings are remote from many. In terms of the trials of people, and their attempts to rise over their circumstances through a sense of duty and moral propriety, Kipling’s works are without peer. For those starting out to discover him, start with “Stalky and Company”, and move to this book, and his other works as extended learning. I hope you come to love his simple characters as I have, and that your School System, and its weird sense of Boyhood Literature does not destroy the desire to read Kipling until your late 60’sThis book has brought great joy to someone in the prime of life, and brings back some important memories of Scouts, Church and Honour in a time when these are so sadly lacking.

⭐Kipling`s British Raj is a foreign country, the stories are from a long time past when the Empire was all consuming and the characters were unlike any we would recognise today, yet they resonate with us in the way of the lost generation of young men from 1914-1918. My grandparents would find these stories quite ordinary and also deliciously shocking. The book makes me feel very connected to his portrayals of the hapless and the ones with humanity & integrity.

⭐I happen to be a great fan of Kipling and after having exhausted some of the more famous pieces like “Kim” and “The Man who Would be King” this was another great trek through the India of Kipling’s imagination and reality. That being said, this is not great as an introduction to Kipling but primo if you want more of the same type of story for which Kipling is famous.

⭐This book is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. If you haven’t read anything by Kipling, this would be a great way to try him out as an author. If you have only read some of his more famous books (i.e. The Jungle Books, Kim), this will show you more of his talent. If you are a fan of his poetry, I would encourage you to check out his prose (this book would be a fine start. If you a fan of his writing in general and haven’t read this, by all means treat yourself.

⭐Recounts so well the far-gone life in theRaj. For lovers of that life in the colonies and how the Brits faced adversities.

⭐This collection of stories from Rudyard Kipling is a mixed bag–some are really good, and some are meandering, and some are outright unintelligible, in the case of the few that are written in the dialect of some of the soldiers. I tried to read those few out loud, which helped to a certain extent. I am a fan of Kipling–I liked Kim, and the Jungle Book, and some other, longer short stories, so I came to it with positive feelings. I enjoy the way he seems to be tongue-in-cheek poking fun at the British aristocrats and military in India. The unfortunate thing about Kipling is that, well, he lived in colonial India, and the underlying racism and otherizing of native Indians is cringingly evident, and can make a couple of the stories, not hard to read, but I feel like I am embarrassed for him, and the fact that the culture he lived in will make him increasingly unpalatable for modern readers. There are some gems though, and those who enjoy his writing will find a few stories in this collection that reflect what we love about Kipling.

⭐Excellent series of short tales from Queen Victoria’s India. Classic Kipling humor with occasional darker stories bordering on the macbre. A must for Kipling fans.

⭐What is there to say? This is classic literature of a high caliber.

⭐My understanding is that in India there are the Plains and there are the Hills (a euphemistic term for the Himalayas) so there is something of a pun carried in the title ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’.You could not wish to find forty more varied and penetrating stories about Anglo/Indian society under the Raj than those which make up this book. They provide us with a brilliant series of windows through which we can look into the social and administrative life of Simla, the summer capital of the Indian Empire. Besides this, they touch upon a very wide range of subjects which include suicide, (implied) transvestism, opium addiction and infant mortality; love variously lost, found and misplaced; careerism, charlatanry, sportsmanship and the supernatural. The brevity of the individual stories, coupled with what the publisher rightly calls their ‘concentration of effect’, means that very few of them will waste the reader’s time.Kipling was twenty when he began writing them, and twenty-two when they were first published in collected form. They were written in the latter half of the 1880s, when he was working as an assistant editor for the ‘Civil and Military Gazette’ in Lahore, north-western India (now Pakistan). It was this journalistic experience which brought him into daily contact with all sorts and conditions of life in India, and it was in the CMG (a daily newspaper) that these stories were first published, in the form of a series.I think it is worth pointing out that if the British Empire in India was ‘a middle-class paradise’ – as one of the characters in these stories refers to it as being – then Kipling does take some pains to include the role played by the working class in its maintenance, principally by way of those tales which feature privates Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney, Kipling’s ‘Soldiers Three’. There are also stories in this collection which penetrate quite deeply into the lives of the native population, of which ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ would be but one example, and I think it is true that Kipling did see a correlation between the Indian caste system and the British class system; referring to one British regiment, for example, as being ‘high-caste’.There are occasions in the ‘Plain Tales’ when I think that Kiplng does affect the manner and tone of voice of a man of considerably more years and experience than he actually had at the time he wrote them. As a result of this, one wonders how reliable his judgement of people and events actually is. Neverthless, one has to acknowledge that these stories were very popular at the time they were written, both amongst their intended local audience and, later, with the wider global readership. And to this day they remain amongst the most popular and widely read of his works. Given his remarkable talents as a storyteller, poet and prose stylist, it is not difficult to see why this is the case. Plus these forty short stories do provide us with a perhaps unparalleled contemporary insight into the values and functioning of Anglo/Indian society at the Victorian apex of the Raj. To this end, Kipling was the right man, in the right place, at the right time.I suppose that Kipling’s status as a journalist meant that he was somewhat semi-detached from the society which he describes. Being neither a military man, nor a member of the Indian Civil Service, possibly meant that he was not quite so dependant upon these institutions for preferment, or even for approval of what he was doing, as others might have been. Even so, he would have had to tread the social and political tightropes with some care, and he was certainly ‘inside’ enough to have been invited, or sent by his newspaper, to Simla (and other Hill stations) for ‘the season’. Presumably in order to report upon their goings on. It is from these places and vantage points that he clearly gleaned a great deal of the material for the ‘Plain Tales’, and a stunningly good collection of stories they are, too.Note: This review relates to the ‘Oxford World’s Classics’ edition which contains an Introduction and General Preface by Andrew Rutherford, a chronology of Kipling’s life and works, as well as Explanatory Notes for the Indian terms which the reader will encounter in the text.

⭐Loved the stories which are very evocative of their time, gossipy and interestingly told. There are supposed to be 40 Plain Tales and I was disappointed that for some reason five of them are missing in this kindle edition. I tried another kindle edition but that one was missing the same Tales as this one. Finally I had to buy a print copy of the book to read the missing Tales. Why is the kindle edition not complete? Surely the description should say it is incomplete so people know what they are buying.

⭐This edition is printed by Amazon from a scan of the text. As a result, the formatting is terrible with wrong line breaks, peculiar capitalisation and frequent spelling mistakes, where the software has misread a letter and it has not been corrected. There are mistakes on every page. It is also a larger size than normal paperbacks. I am rreturning this copy to Amazon and will be buying a properly produced edition instead.

⭐I wish I could award no star whatsoever. Am tempted to keep it to show my friends how a giant like Amazon (they printed it – re-published it as it were) can be so clumsy. Yes, typos on every page, even on the front cover. Horribly blurred pixellated image on front cover. Contents list gives page numbers but no page numbering. Stories start in the middle of page without even a blank line above. Words mis-scanned to produce a line of meaningless punctuation symbols. A classic turned into risible gibberish. The worst layout design I have ever seen. Narrow margins in centre add to difficulty in reading. Risks making a laughing stock of Amazon.

⭐Sadly lost in my Kindle which has clammed up on me. I love these stories so perhaps will buy it as a book.

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