Word: rumer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...RUMER GODDEN 274 pages. Viking...
...gods, Saraswati is the goddess of pen, ink and books. She must have given the young Godden sisters a double blessing. Half a century later, the ex-colonials are still writing with fecundity and style-often about their childhood in India. Jon, 70, has just produced her tenth novel; Rumer, 69, her 15th. Rumer has also written poetry, stories and children's books. In addition, the Goddens have collaborated on two volumes: Shiva's Pigeons (1972) and the highly acclaimed Two Under the Indian Sun (1966), a memoir of the years spent among the textures and atmospheres...
...Peacock Spring, Rumer again evidences the profound understanding of children that she showed in The River and An Episode of Sparrows. Two adolescent English girls, Una and Halcy on, are called out to Delhi by their envoy father - only to discover that they are chaperones to his Eurasian fiancee. At first the book evokes the formal, secluded India of the diplomats: banks of flow ers, servants, gardeners, even a boy to beat dew from the lawn. It is a world of riding, parties and ease. Then Una and Ravi, a young Indian poet, fall in love - and the India...
...Rumer and Jon were wrenched away from India and sent to school in England before they were ready to part from the reality and the symbols of a happy childhood. Probably this separation affected Rumer more seriously; it is she who seems obsessed with the torments of young people hovering on the steps of maturity. It is she who ar rests the mind with a metaphor for the land of contrasts, the country whose preening beauty cannot mask the terror that persists in life as in fictive reconstructions: "Do you know why the peacock gives those terrible screams...