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FMK: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Look, it's an FMK response! I bet you forgot those existed! I almost did!
The good news is, my copy (a 1950s vintage paperback "Best Seller Classics" edition featuring a bright green "handsome leatherette cover") survived me reading it! The leatherette cover was actually more protective than expected (it's fully waterproof, don't ask me why I now know that) and I enjoyed it as a physical object enough that I might keep it even if I'd hated the text.
But I did not hate the text! Kipling remains a very good writer - the music in his poetry comes through in his prose and I love that he's so unashamed about letting his language be baroquely beautiful.
Somehow I had managed to miss the fact that the Jungle Book is an anthology rather than a novel until I actually started reading it, so if you, like me, had not realized this, there are three Mowgli stories, one story about a seal, and some stories about domesticated animals under the British Raj in India, interspersed with poems related to the stories. The Mowgli stories and poems were by far the best.
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rushthatspeaks said in the original poll comments that "The Jungle Book is Kipling's least-racist work in which POC appear. I am aware that this is extremely faint praise, and it is intended to be," and that's a pretty accurate summation on that front. (Also, I found the Mowgli stories better than the others race-wise, but that's probably just because no white people appear in them, so without context you can pretend that he's disparaging all humans in comparison to the jungle, rather than Indian culture in particular.)
It's been a long, long, long time since I've seen the Jungle Book movie, but I think I liked the stories in comparison to them. Mowgli's life in the jungle, and particularly his problems navigating between his birth culture and the one where he was raised, are addressed in a actually fairly complicated way! As is the way the jungle creatures accommodate and adapt to the human settlements constantly encroaching on their homes. Also, at no point does it imply that sexual attraction to women is the fundamental thing makes you a human being, so that's good.
Also, I really liked that Bagheera, in the books, was raised by humans. I don't remember that coming up in the movies, but it makes his relationship with Mowgli even more interesting. (Also, if you came out of watching a movie version shipping Bagheera/Baloo, well, yeah, that's there in the book too. What is it with adventure stories giving their main character two dads who love each other very much? Minimizes the yucky female influence in their childhood, I guess?)
On the other stories - the one about the elephant dance was by far the most racist. The one about the seal was interesting, as a viewpoint on extinction via overhunting far earlier than most people think about it, and also I do believe in a secret enclave of Steller's Sea Cows somewhere in the North Pacific, I do I do. The one about the warhorses was mostly interesting as a view of what war was like when armies were at least half animals, which is becoming forgotten these days, really. If there were others they did not make enough of an impression that I remember them.
Seeing the influence these stories have had - not just on generations of children's literature, but on generations of English-speaking children - was really interesting, too. Reading the story about the war-horses, I felt less like I was getting a glimpse of a 19th century army in India, and more like I was getting a glimpse into the imaginary inner lives of hundreds of British children in cold stuffy nurseries for generation after generation, and that was its own sort of absorbing experience. (I'm sure the handsome leatherette cover helped with that, too.)
The good news is, my copy (a 1950s vintage paperback "Best Seller Classics" edition featuring a bright green "handsome leatherette cover") survived me reading it! The leatherette cover was actually more protective than expected (it's fully waterproof, don't ask me why I now know that) and I enjoyed it as a physical object enough that I might keep it even if I'd hated the text.
But I did not hate the text! Kipling remains a very good writer - the music in his poetry comes through in his prose and I love that he's so unashamed about letting his language be baroquely beautiful.
Somehow I had managed to miss the fact that the Jungle Book is an anthology rather than a novel until I actually started reading it, so if you, like me, had not realized this, there are three Mowgli stories, one story about a seal, and some stories about domesticated animals under the British Raj in India, interspersed with poems related to the stories. The Mowgli stories and poems were by far the best.
rushthatspeaks said in the original poll comments that "The Jungle Book is Kipling's least-racist work in which POC appear. I am aware that this is extremely faint praise, and it is intended to be," and that's a pretty accurate summation on that front. (Also, I found the Mowgli stories better than the others race-wise, but that's probably just because no white people appear in them, so without context you can pretend that he's disparaging all humans in comparison to the jungle, rather than Indian culture in particular.)It's been a long, long, long time since I've seen the Jungle Book movie, but I think I liked the stories in comparison to them. Mowgli's life in the jungle, and particularly his problems navigating between his birth culture and the one where he was raised, are addressed in a actually fairly complicated way! As is the way the jungle creatures accommodate and adapt to the human settlements constantly encroaching on their homes. Also, at no point does it imply that sexual attraction to women is the fundamental thing makes you a human being, so that's good.
Also, I really liked that Bagheera, in the books, was raised by humans. I don't remember that coming up in the movies, but it makes his relationship with Mowgli even more interesting. (Also, if you came out of watching a movie version shipping Bagheera/Baloo, well, yeah, that's there in the book too. What is it with adventure stories giving their main character two dads who love each other very much? Minimizes the yucky female influence in their childhood, I guess?)
On the other stories - the one about the elephant dance was by far the most racist. The one about the seal was interesting, as a viewpoint on extinction via overhunting far earlier than most people think about it, and also I do believe in a secret enclave of Steller's Sea Cows somewhere in the North Pacific, I do I do. The one about the warhorses was mostly interesting as a view of what war was like when armies were at least half animals, which is becoming forgotten these days, really. If there were others they did not make enough of an impression that I remember them.
Seeing the influence these stories have had - not just on generations of children's literature, but on generations of English-speaking children - was really interesting, too. Reading the story about the war-horses, I felt less like I was getting a glimpse of a 19th century army in India, and more like I was getting a glimpse into the imaginary inner lives of hundreds of British children in cold stuffy nurseries for generation after generation, and that was its own sort of absorbing experience. (I'm sure the handsome leatherette cover helped with that, too.)
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FWIW, that's very much how they came across to me as a kid. (Actually - with the caveat that it's been probably 30 years since I last read the book - I don't even remember the "no white people" thing at all; I just remember generic "humans" as a group, and Mowgli's disdain and confusion about them.)
The main other thing I remember now about the book - which I loved as a kid, and reread over and over - is that I always pictured Mowgli as an adult, or at least an older teen, in most of the stories, and looking back on it now, I'm not sure if he was supposed to be. I wasn't interested in the animated movie in part because he looked so young in it, and I didn't ever picture him as a kid my age, but rather as a young adult, a la Tarzan.
Either my version of the book didn't have any stories in it not involving Mowgli, or I never read them, because I don't remember other stories in the book at all.
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Honestly I have never actually gotten through the non-Mowgli stories in the Jungle Book. Maybe if I do go back and pick them up I'll skip the elephant dance one.
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The one with the seal was fun if you like Bambi-style stories from animal POVs about them getting mercilessly slaughtered by hunters!
Oh, and I forget in the main post, it also has Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which is also quite good, but that one still gets anthologized a lot so I'd read it several times before.
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