Beautiful

Godden paints with a soft but vivid pallet and a fine brush. After living in India years ago, through her writing I can taste, see, and breathe it. I would love to see Renoir's film off this.

La ternura de la infancia, la belleza de la India, el descubrirse, crecer, aprender a nacer y a morir. Este libro es un canto a la infancia, a la vida.

nostalgic | gentle | charming

Truly gentle reminder that we all grow up and have to change, but we can do so with the strength and the joy of the child in us never leaving.

Don't think I have ever connected to any writer so deeply so quickly. Just reading the preface on Kindle, the description of coconut oil on black hair, the smell of India, I knew I had found a special connection. Beautiful is an understatement for this book.

Started reading the physical copy on the day of Diwali, the festival of lights.

“It happens, and then things come round again, begin again, and you can’t stop them. They go on happening, whatever happens.”
Sigh. I love what I’ve read of Rumer Godden so far (mostly the Indian stuff) and I love the 1951 film “The River” but this just didn’t do it for me. It felt like a YA novel, which is a genre I can appreciate, but it didn’t get me to any great catharsis like the film does. “You can’t stop days or rivers,” is a wonderful thought but in this novella it felt like the realization of a young girl rather than the musings of an older person looking back. Undercooked.

Rumer Godden is remarkable, and I feel like she's not talked about remotely as much as she deserves to be.

This volume has one long-ish and two short-ish short stories. The River is about a white British family living in Bengal between the wars. It's a meditation on loss. The loss of self and health, in the person of Captain John; the loss of childhood and innocence, in Harriet and Bea; the loss of death, of course. And the loss of a place, that comfortable childhood 'home' that one day you wake up and realise is just ... gone.

"Valerie nudged her sharply. 'What a silly you are!' she whispered down Harriet's neck. 'You will make him feel awful. How can he be anything?'
But - he has to be, thought Harriet. Of course he has to be. He didn't die."

"There was no gap before, thought Harriet, puzzled. There was no empty place and yet we fitted her in."

What an insight to have about babies!

"'Call it an incident, a happening. With each new happening, perhaps with each person we meet if they are important to us, we must either be born again, or die a little bit; big deaths and little ones, big and little births.'
'I should think it would be easier to go on being born, than to die all the time,' said Harriet.
'If we can,' said Captain John, 'but it takes a bit of doing. It is called growing, Harriet, and it is often painful and difficult. On the whole, it is very much easier to die.'
'But you didn't,' said Harriet."

JESUS.

The two shorter stories are from the point of view of tribesmen in I want to say Kashmir, although I could be totally wrong. They are unusual in that they are obviously a white person attempting to inhabit the mind of a non-white person, and write as if they were that person, which is a task fraught with such difficulty and hazard that it's usually better not attempted. Yet this is probably the most successful work of its kind I have ever read, and the more astonishing given that it was written in 1946 and so you would expect it to ping a few racist tripwires. But there you go. We stan a queen.

— ¿Hacerse mayor duele? — preguntó Harriet .

Rumer Godden y Harriet, la protagonista de esta novelita, me han conquistado desde el minuto uno.
La primera, por su manera de evocar, de hacerte partícipe de los olores y colores de la India, con una prosa sencilla, poética y bella; la segunda, por su inteligencia, ternura, -en más de un momento me han dado ganas de abrazarla muy fuerte- y esa mirada tan especial e inocente del mundo que la rodea.
Sentirse identificada con ella, sus pensamientos y dudas ha sido inevitable, más si cabe, en estos tiempos de retiro hogareño. Y la verdad, es que ha sido un gustazo enorme tropezar casi por casualidad -como ocurre con los instantes bonitos- con este precioso y entrañable homenaje a la infancia que, por supuesto, ya forma parte de mi Century of books.

Como apunte adicional os cuento que en 1951 Jean Renoir realizó la adaptación cinematográfica de 'El Río', por si os animáis; yo, ya la tengo reservada para verla estos días.

El mundo gira y gira...
da vueltas en su eje.
El sol sale, la luna te mira,
caen las hojas, el brote florece.
El mundo gira y gira,
cae la noche, la luz se desvanece,
todo empieza y todo termina.

Da sempre sono affascinata dai racconti che seguono il punto di vista dei bambini, cangiante e mutevole, ma sempre fisso con i piedi per terra, radicato nel presente e con i sogni che squarciano il velo del futuro. È questo, insieme alle odorose e concrete descrizioni dell'India, ad avermi intrigato di più di questo romanzo, oltre alla straordinaria vicenda dell'autrice, che non conoscevo.

"È troppo difficile essere una persona. Non soltanto devi continuare ad andare avanti. Bisogna anche essere grandi”, proprio così, piccola Harriet.

n  

Harriet's river was a great slowly flowing mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, jute fields and rice fields under a blue weight of sky. 'If there is any space in me,' Harriet said, when she was grown up, 'it is from that sky.'

'How beautiful it is,' said Harriet. Its beauty penetrated into the heat and the ache of the hollowness inside her. It had a quiet unhurriedness, a time beat that was infinitely soothing to Harriet. 'You can't stop days or rivers,' not stop them, and not hurry them. Her cheeks grew cool and the ferment in her heart grew quieter too, more slow.

n

This short novel, hardly more than a novella really, is intensely atmospheric - almost more like a rich fever-dream. Some of that has to do with the author's powers of description. Flowers, trees, animals, insects, the sounds and sights of the river, the sky: colour, scent, sound.

n  

They lived in a the Big House in a big garden on the river with the tall flowering cork tree by their front steps. It was their world, complete. Up to this winter it had been completely happy.

n

The narrator is Harriet, the 2nd of four children - dreamy yet observant, a girl on the cusp of adolescence. Harriet already knows herself to be a writer, and she is both the centre of this story and a spinner of her own stories. (From what I've read of Rumer Godden's life, I suspect she drew on her own childhood experiences to create both the setting and the character of Harriet.)

It's a coming-of-age story in the sense that a tragedy will force Harriet to pass from her childish innocence to a more self-aware stage of experience. Just as in literal birth, which also takes place in the novel, change is accompanied by pain.

At the beginning of the book, Harriet and her older sister Bea are practising their Latin: the declension and conjunction of 'love' and 'war'. It's very much a foreshadowing of the events of the novel. The setting is Dhaka, Bangladesh; although Harriet knows no other home, the reader will be keenly aware that this colonial 'idyll' will not last much longer. Although the year is never explicitly stated, a young man named Captain John is recovering at their home from years of being a prisoner-of-war. It's obviously somewhere near the tail end of World War II and the colonial age of Britain's rule over the Indian sub-continent. Harriet's father is something high up at 'The Works' - a huge jute processing factory which is on the river, just adjacent to their own 'Big House'. His work is part of the sounds and the traffic of the river.

n  

'Puff-wait-puff' sounded the escape steam from the Works, and the water ran calmly in the river.

n

I was completely immersed in the hypnotic rhythms of this story. It's a beautifully philosophical novel, full of symbols and metaphors, but gracefully so. 4.5 stars

This is like a coming-of-age story, but for a younger age range than the usual type of coming-of-age story. Set against the backdrop of a beautiful Indian garden, the story follows the main character, Harriet, who is on the cusp of becoming a teenager and who finds herself having to reconcile with all of the changes that growing up entails.

I adore Harriet. She's a precocious girl. Always disappearing to write her poems/stories/thoughs, always asking questions no-one wishes to answer, always absorbing everything and everyone in her vicinity. Innocent and precious as all of the children in this book are. Her (slightly odd) friendship and affinity with Captain John was beautifully written. I enjoyed their shared philosophies and appreciated all of the symbolism.

I didn't expect to love this as much as I do, but it hit me square in the chest. The only issue I have with this book is that it isn't longer. I found myself really needing a full length novel following Bea, Harriett, Bogey, and Victoria as they grow up, and of Captain John overcoming his war traumas, and of Nan quietly but surely nudging them all onto their paths of life. Even though I wish this was longer, the story was by no means lacking for me. It's short, but boy did it pack an emotional punch! It had me sobbing during the second half. I wanted to scoop up Harriet and give her lots of cuddles and take the time to actually answer all of her questions.

There are many chapters in this novella in which not much happens, but descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of India are marvelous. A not unexpected tragedy propels young Harriet in this coming of age saga.