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A review by sjbozich
The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling
3.0
With Sean Connery's death, I wanted to go back to the movie based upon the title story here, and finally read the story as well. Director Huston fills out the story, which is only about 44 pages long, quite well for a 2:10 movie, and keeps it in a very Kiplingesque mode thr0ughout the film.
Kipling's bibliographic history is quite a maze, but the selection of 17 stories here are from his 6 pamphlets from the Indian Railway publications, most of them printed earlier in the newspapers he worked for in India. I am not quite sure if that was 28 or 36 stories published in those 6 inexpensive volumes (flimsy, in a moist climate, and read to pieces, I wonder what one of them would cost today on the rare book market!). And the 3 stories he added on to the first British publication, which was in 3 volumes.
As editor Louis Cornell points out, there is a great deal of difference between those earlier, quick-write for newspaper publications, and the later 3 tales.
OTOH, this is one of the weaker Oxford World Classics Intros - it is outdated (late '80's), as is the bibliography of further reading. He assumes the reader already has a knowledge of the stories included in the volume, and goes on about characters being confined and hemmed in and enclosed. Little about British Imperialism.
His Notes are inconsistent. He does let us know that he depended upon the 1980's 4 volume Readers Guide from the Kipling Society, without using all of their notes. Amazingly, this RG was not comprehensive, and is now being updated as the New Readers Guide! A couple volumes of his work are available with the new notes on Kindle. In the case of "Soldiers Three", one third of the volume is Notes!
Many of the stories included here are set in the British Summering place of Simla, and many are stories of the flirtations and affairs that occur there annually. Although there are stories of war, and the military ranks, and from the POV of Indian natives here as well.
I had not read Kipling in decades, and plan to read more - mostly his earlier work. Right now I have little interest in his "Jungle Book" stories or his poetry.
Kipling's bibliographic history is quite a maze, but the selection of 17 stories here are from his 6 pamphlets from the Indian Railway publications, most of them printed earlier in the newspapers he worked for in India. I am not quite sure if that was 28 or 36 stories published in those 6 inexpensive volumes (flimsy, in a moist climate, and read to pieces, I wonder what one of them would cost today on the rare book market!). And the 3 stories he added on to the first British publication, which was in 3 volumes.
As editor Louis Cornell points out, there is a great deal of difference between those earlier, quick-write for newspaper publications, and the later 3 tales.
OTOH, this is one of the weaker Oxford World Classics Intros - it is outdated (late '80's), as is the bibliography of further reading. He assumes the reader already has a knowledge of the stories included in the volume, and goes on about characters being confined and hemmed in and enclosed. Little about British Imperialism.
His Notes are inconsistent. He does let us know that he depended upon the 1980's 4 volume Readers Guide from the Kipling Society, without using all of their notes. Amazingly, this RG was not comprehensive, and is now being updated as the New Readers Guide! A couple volumes of his work are available with the new notes on Kindle. In the case of "Soldiers Three", one third of the volume is Notes!
Many of the stories included here are set in the British Summering place of Simla, and many are stories of the flirtations and affairs that occur there annually. Although there are stories of war, and the military ranks, and from the POV of Indian natives here as well.
I had not read Kipling in decades, and plan to read more - mostly his earlier work. Right now I have little interest in his "Jungle Book" stories or his poetry.