Kingfishers Catch Fire in Retro Reads

Jan 14, 2021 Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-classics

This book is definitely a slow starter, but is well worth the patience needed.

When the strong willed Sophie is widowed in the middle of the twentieth century, she moves with her two children to a more isolated part of Kashmir. Sophie, after paying her feckless husband's debts, has very little money to live on, but to the local villagers she appears wealthy. Of course she gets ripped off, but of more concern is now blind Sophie can be to anything she doesn't want to see...

At the invitation of

...more

36 likes · Like · see review

Apr 19, 2016 Dorcas rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: india-ceylon-orient, rumer-godden

While reading this I was thinking how much it reads like a memoir even though it is a novel. However, after reading the author's note it all makes sense. While this is fiction, the author draws much of the story from her own life experiences as a mother on her own with two young children as she attempts to live a peasant's life in India.

In the story, the woman Sophie is a widow (but not a sad one; in real life the author was divorced) and her husband leaves her destitute. She could go home to En ...more

21 likes · Like · see review

Mar 16, 2021 Eilonwy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: heartbreaking, heartwarming, character-driven, beautifully-written, diverse-characters

Recently-widowed in Kashmir with two young children and a paltry pension, Sophie needs an affordable place to live. She chooses a house called Dhilkusha — ❝Ӎy heart is happy❞ — in a mountain village inhabited mostly by shepherds. And for a while, her heart is happy, or at least light-ish. But Sophie is self-absorbed and a bit careless, unable to stop spending money on pretty things, oblivious to the tensions between the Dar and Sheikh families in the village, and callous to the unhappiness of

Recently-widowed in Kashmir with two young children and a paltry pension, Sophie needs an affordable place to live. She chooses a house called Dhilkusha — ❝Ӎy heart is happy❞ — in a mountain village inhabited mostly by shepherds. And for a while, her heart is happy, or at least light-ish. But Sophie is self-absorbed and a bit careless, unable to stop spending money on pretty things, oblivious to the tensions between the Dar and Sheikh families in the village, and callous to the unhappiness of her elder child, 8-year-old Teresa. At some point, the tensions will snap.

Rumer Godden is one of my all-time favorite authors. I developed a taste for her bittersweet tales when I read The Dolls' House 0670050482 over and over as a child, and I’ve admired her adult books just as much. It’s funny — I wouldn’t describe her books as something I ❝enjoy,❞ exactly. They’re not dark, but they’re full of twilight, loss, and aching. Every single one of her novels that I’ve read haunts me. But they are also beautifully written, simply and starkly, and yet with a vividness that allows me to step fully into them both as I’m reading them and when I think of them later. They’re each absolutely perfect in their knife-twisting inevitability. I finish the books convinced that there’s no way any of these stories could have turned out differently.

I avoided this book for years because the title made me think it was a romance, and I never bothered to read the jacket flap to find out otherwise. Oops. Because it is absolutely not a romance. (If anything, it is anti-romance.)

Sophie is a flawed character, not especially ❝likable,❞ at least not to me. All that overspending made me cringe, and her lack of sensitivity to her children and neighbors was painful. But at the same time, she seems very genuine. It’s just that being truly in someone else’s head, with no filter, is a bit jarring, and also a bit queasy-making: I always wonder if I would come across as any more likable if anyone could read all my thoughts and reactions, and end up certain that I probably would not. And Sophie does have some charms, especially her determination to find beauty and joy in the world. She may spend too much money on pretty things, but she absolutely loves and appreciates those things. Mostly, she is just another human being trying to make her way in the world as best she can, even if that way seems awfully strewn with foibles. I was rooting for her, even as I kept figuratively covering my eyes and muttering, ❝No, no, no,❞ at her.

My thanks to the Retro Reads GR group for making me take a closer look at this book and read it at long last. It will stick me as tightly as everything else I’ve read by Rumer Godden ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Jan 07, 2021 Infosifter rated it liked it

Sophie is estranged from her husband when she is unexpectedly widowed, leaving her with two young children and no money. A willful woman prone to violent enthusiasms, she decides to live as a peasant in Kashmir rather than return to the safety of her family in England. She is blind to any reality but the one she imagines in her own mind, so she is completely unaware of the devastating effects her appearance and behavior have on the local people. The writing here is subtle; details and small even ...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Jan 25, 2021 Elinor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This novel has a wonderful setting in the beautiful mountainous region of Kashmir in northern India, not long after the Second World War.
An English widow with two young children and a highly idealized vision of living "like a peasant" moves to a small rural village, and runs into all kinds of difficulties through her blindness to reality. Her financial status is a far cry from the real poverty that exists, and the villagers are divided into camps on religious grounds, both of them vying for her ...more

10 likes · Like · see review

May 03, 2019 Moonkiszt rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: learned_me, botanicals-flowers-trees-plants, indigenous-peoples, encroachment-displacement, writerswriting, forgiveness, violence-to-individuals, characteristical, mother-child-connundrum, geo-india-environs

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all h ...more

8 likes · Like · see review

Jan 07, 2021 Carolien rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2021, india

Based on the author’s experience of living in a small house in Kashmir with her two daughters, she tells the story of Sophie Barrington-Ward a widow who decides to make a simple living in a village outside Srinigar. Sophie is poor by English standards, but rich according to the villagers who use her resources to improve their livelihoods. Sophie’s daughter Teresa experiences the village and its children as a much more hostile environment than her mother. Sophie’s naivety eventually results in tr ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 21, 2016 Theresa rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

“In India a woman alone does not go and live alone – not, at any rate, far from her own kind, not unless she is a saint or a great sinner. Sophie was not a saint, or a sinner, but she was undeniably a woman.”

I was left with mixed feelings from this novel that depicted life in a small peasant village in India.

Sophie, left by the unexpected early death of her husband Denzil, has become gravely ill. Taken to a Mission hospital, her long recovery results in new friendships for her, but Sophie will b ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Mar 16, 2018 Tania rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: middlebrow, virago, india

I gave this one 5*for the ending. All gthe way through, I thought it was going to end in a certain way, but it didn't. This both surprised and pleased me. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jan 19, 2021 Kate rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Sophie decides to live in a little mountain villa in the Vale of Kashmir after her husband’s death. As a widow with two young children and very little income, she has been advised to move back to England. But Sophie has her own ideas. She is determined to make a home out of this dilapidated house and to live with and as a “local” and like it.

What she isn’t prepared for are the villagers’ assumptions about her (English=rich) and her assumptions of them cause many problems culminating in a near-t ...more

Like · see review