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Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Central | Adult | Open Stacks Fiction | Open Stacks book | GODDE | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Author Notes
Margaret Rumer Godden was born Dec. 10, 1907, in Sussex, England. She was nine months old when her family moved to India, where her father ran a shipping line. She returned to London at age 20 to learn how to teach dance to children, and opened a school back in India. Returning to England while she was pregnant, she wrote her first book, "Chinese Puzzle," published in 1936. Her marriage to a stockbroker, Laurence Sinclair Foster, ended in 1941, leaving her penniless.
In an effort to pay off her former husband's debts, Godden moved her family into a mountain cottage where she ran a school, made herbal teas for sale, and wrote books. Another novel of India, "The River," published in 1949, was one of her most acclaimed books and was made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1951. She returned to England to stay in 1945.
Rumer Godden was the author of more than 60 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry, plays and non-fiction. She published her 21st novel, "Cromartie vs. the God Shiva," in 1997. Rumer Godden died a year later on November 8, 1998, in Thornhill, Scotland, at the age of 90.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
India was home to British authors Rumer and her late sister Jon during much of their lives. In this collection, stories of rare sensitivity shed light on widely various communities: lush Kashmir; upward-striving Bengal; utterly deprived Calcutta. Subtle humor animates three of four pieces by Jon, notably ``The Carpet,'' about a master of the soft sell who makes his costly treasures irresistible to the strongest will. These stories differ slightly in viewpoint from Rumer's contributions, two haunting narrative poems and seven adventures. But there are similarities also; as Rumer notes, she and Jon``felt intensely about the same things.'' The title character in Jon's ``Miss Passano'' grumbles about inconveniences while battering her small, defenseless niece for a minor mistake. In the collection's title story by Rumer, ``mercy, pity, peace and love'' are the qualities an ambitious student aims to investigate in his doctoral thesis, even as he is unmoved to such feelings surrounded by people suffering on Calcutta's teeming streets. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A collection of stories by the two Godden sisters that, for the most part, should have been left to molder in the old magazines they appeared in years ago. The majority are by the better-known Rumer, but all are so similar in style, sentiment and setting that who wrote what is largely irrelevant. The pieces, reflecting the years the sisters spent in India--both as children and adults--are set in three places in India: Bengal, Calcutta, and Kashmir. And most are about characters who learn too late, or never, some crucial truth. In the title story, a young student accompanies his father through a teeming Calcutta marketplace. Preoccupied with his need to complete his thesis on the ""Nature of Human Love,"" he fails to notice that the material he requires is all around him: a starving woman begs for money to bury her dead baby; a young girl watches her aunt spend a sum equal to a year's school fees--a sum she had been told was unavailable for her education; and a livestock-dealer demonstrates his cruelty to the wild animals and birds he sells. In ""Sister Malone and the Obstinate Man,"" a nun in charge of an outpatient clinic preaches to the younger nuns on the need for faith in doing their work, but fails to recognize the equally strong faith of an old man who believes the charm round his neck will cure him. In the two other notable stories, characters experience their epiphanies too late: after they have killed a beautiful creature (""The Wild Duck"") or been impatient with a poor craftsman (""Rahmin""). The Goddens are good at local color, but their obvious sympathies come too close to sentimentality--and the points made, the morals drawn, and the insights learned are pat. Only for the most faithful of Godden fans. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Rumer Godden has pulled together several of her own and her sister Jon's stories for this new collection of 13 stories. In comparison to the power and beauty of some of their other fiction, this is a weak sampling. Still, their intimacy with India sends luminous glimmers through even the most mundane of tales, unveiling facets of life there unexplored by others. In one, a young Hindu student becomes intensely homesick while dining in Paris; in another, a poor, modest sales clerk turns down a part in a movie; in a third, an ill-behaved nomad youth undergoes a change after being assigned the care of a black lamb. Fans of both authors will ask for these stories, some of which have been previously published in Collier's, the New Yorker, Story magazine, and elsewhere. More about India can be found in Rumer's recent memoir, A House with Four Rooms [BKL S 15 89]. --Denise Perry Donavin
Library Journal Review
These 13 stories and two poems are the third joint collection of two British sisters who spent much of their childhood in a Bengali village. (Jon Godden died in 1984.) Most of the stories are by the popular Rumer, author of over 20 novels, as well as works of nonfiction, poetry, children's books, and, most recently, the second volume of her memoirs, A House with Four Rooms ( LJ 10/1/89). Set in Calcutta, Bengal, and Kashmir, the stories conjure up an India rife with both the expected sensual luxuries and small but significant cruelties. In the title story, a student struggles to write a dissertation on brotherly love amidst squalor and greed in a Calcutta bazaar. In ``The Wild Duck,'' the imperfect slaughter of a female duck by a Kashmiri boy is told with characteristic passion and sensitivity. Though somewhat lacking in vitality, the writing is graceful, details are rich , and a pleasant sense of timelessness prevails.-- Susanna Bartmann Pathak, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
