Kim

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

"In all India is no one so alone as I!"

Rudyard Kipling's Kim is the story of Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, who spends his childhood as a vagabond in Lahore. With an old Tibetan lama, he travels through India, enthralled by the "roaring whirl" of the landscape and cities of richly colored bazaars and immense diversity of people.

The novel is a masterpiece of careful organization and skillfully manipulated narrative techniques. By portraying Kim's utter devotion to the lama and his ability to share the life of the common people intimately and unselfconsciously, Kipling creates a vision of harmony - and of India - that unites the secular and the spiritual, the life of action with that of contemplation.

Public Domain (P)2010 Tantor

Taken away

Humbling adventure in a fare away land... bringing us to to a time forgotten to the present culture.

I keep hoping for a sequel

Here is a magnificently low key, beautifully phrased story of love and faithfulness. Not to be missed, and carefully remembered.

Good read

What a book. From start to finish it is a great read and full of action and suspense. Simon Vance does an incredible job, as usual, to bring the book to life

A quest story, written in an evocative style from the exotic nature of India

This a quest story basically. It is written in an evocative style rendering the exotic geography, languages, dialects, culture, superstitions, religions, mores, poverty, and politics of India. Through reading I was compelled to consider Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ pilgrims. Simon Vance gives another convincing performance.

Fantastic

I had never read or auditioned anything by Kipling before and my primary exposure to his body of work had been through children's stories, and those through film adaptations. I was drawn to "Kim" because of its role as an early espionage tale. Other than that, and the fact that it was set in India during the time of the British Empire, I really did not know what to expect.

"Kim" turns out to be a fantastically detailed and absorbing tale. An adage of creative writing is to use details to make a story come alive. "Kim" manages to be a veritable riot of narrative details, yet without it seeming studied or forced. Kipling rather seemed to have been simply observing carefully a land and a people ("peoples," really) rich in beauty, mystique, danger, and social complexity. All the elements of a great yarn are here: danger, love, ambition, intrigue, adventure, and so on, so it satisfies as mere genre fiction, but it is more than that. The characters in this novel grow and change, look inward and outward, think, fear, hope, laugh and cry, and we do all those things with them along the way. I was completely transported by it. I absolutely loved this book and was sorry when it ended.

The narration was equally superb. There are many characters of different cultures in the tale and Simon Vance brought each of them alive. The whole thing is just splendid.

Terrible narration

Simon Vance was brilliant in other books, such as David Copperfield, that take place in Britain. But his attempt at imitating Indian accents, esp in falsetto at higher pitches for women and children, was impossible to listen to. I had to stop listening and switch to a different narration, the first time that's ever happened to me on audiobook

terrible voice over - gives me a headache

What would have made Kim better?

A better narrator. This narrator is horrible.

What do you think your next listen will be?

I am looking for this book in print now because I can't listen to such bad voice over.

Would you be willing to try another one of Simon Vance’s performances?

NO way.

What character would you cut from Kim?

I couldn't finish listening to the book.

Any additional comments?

Voiceover artists trying to mimic Indian accents is a very bad idea. I'll be asking for a refund.