Category Archives: Kipling Rudyard

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling Rating: ★★★½ Series: Little Black Classics #24 Publication Date: October 11, 2014 Genre: short stories Pages: 52 ReRead?: No Project: Project 365 'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.' Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and shocking stories of northwest India, where he grew up. This is just a small selection from his inexhaustibly contentious and various early work.

Tuesdays are the longest work day for my employment contract, where I have the least reading time available, so I’ve unofficially decided that I will be reading one of the books from my Penguin box sets – either the black classics or the modern classics – on Tuesdays.

I’ve previously read Kim by Kipling, and I liked it pretty well. Kipling has fallen out of favor in these late, post-colonial and anti-imperial times, because he did write from a distinctly British view point about colonial India. I have never read his children’s stories – the Just So Stories and the Jungle Book – although I have, of course, seen the Disney adaptation of the latter.

The 6 stories in this tiny book:

• Thrown Away
• False Dawn
• In the House of Suddho
• The Bisara of Pooree
• The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
• The Story of Mohammad Din

are stories for adults, not children. I enjoyed them a lot – they are packed with imagery. Each story is told from a first person perspective, although I don’t think the narrator is identified in any of them. They are strange and morbid little tales, addressing death, opium addiction, magic and suicide. There isn’t much backstory – the reader is plunged directly into the story which barely get going before they are over. The best of them is also the title story, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.

Kipling was wildly popular during his lifetime, although he seems rather conspicuously old-fashioned (and racist) at this point. But he had style, and I think I’d be interested in some of his children’s stories.