Mooltiki: Stories and Poems from India

by Rumer Godden, Sheila Auden (Illustrator)

Book by Rumer Godden

Hardcover

First published November 8, 1957

About the author

Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951.
A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.

Reviews

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would buy this book. I love the typeface and the single-color woodcuts introducing the main chapters. Godden's writing is sensual and leaves out none of the senses: movement, color, sound. Her characters smell snow, smell dust. Amid some sorrows is sly humor, as in Sister Malone's story. Or this description of a tame elephant: "I have known her, in the forest, to pick a flower, not a branch to beat flies off or a frond to wave as most elephants do, but a flower to hold." The imagery of The Wild Duck is pure poetry. "There were hundreds of ducks along the river and it was fitting that the first light showed duck colours: cream mottled with grey and brown and the bottle-green colours of duck necks. The grey was in the hulls of the boats, the browns in the mats that hung along their sides, while the snow was trodden to cream-brown slush on the banks...The wild duck came down upon the green as silently as the snowflakes; she folded her wings along her back and rocked a little on the water as she settled." Wow, how many Europeans living in India saw this much beauty? And she is no less generous in her depictions of ordinary people, no matter how poor.