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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful novella of place and culture clash,
By
This review is from: Black Narcissus (Paperback)
English and Irish nuns work to establish a convent in a disused palace, in a remote tea-growing area of India. Ancient debaucheries seem to echo in the carved hallways, and finally the sensuous and pagan spirit of the dwelling saps their strenuous ideals. Tragedy forces the mother superior faces up to her own character flaws and emerge a wiser person. Elegantly and sparsely written,with a poetic and keen perception.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No place for a nunnery,
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This review is from: Black Narcissus (Paperback)
The story is simple. Nuns are sent to an old palace in the mountains near Darjeeling to start a nunnery. They plan to open a school and a dispensary, to run the orchards. But things are not as easy as they seem. The Sisters find themselves haunted by the beauty of the mountains, their memories, even the very air.They question why they are there and why they are Nuns. Each and every Sister has to fight her own battle and, sadly for them, they don't win. But they learn from it and, therefore, it is not their final defeat either. The story has a clear theme of how one needs to either join a land or ignore it. You can't live there and pretend to be a visitor. But the Sisters could not join it nor could they ignore it, and therefore they were trapped in a limbo of unhappiness and memory. I can see why it was made into a movie. Mr. Dean is a great character. He isn't rude, just honest and his views on religion is remarkable. This book is a must for anybody.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rumer Godden's Rungli-Rungliot and Black Narcissus,
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This review is from: Black Narcissus (Paperback)
Rungli-Rungliot was Rumer Godden's first attempt to introduce her autobiographical anecdotes. It was published by Penguin Paperback which she had donated for free distribution to the Armed Forces. The episodes of Black Narcissus and Rungli-Rungliot or its redacted version 'This Far and No Further' are intertwined in substance, that Rumer Godden had written it to celebrate her own father's eternal love life in the neighbouring tea estate of Gielle, before he went down to the Plains to manage a jute factory.The story of Black Narcissus revolves around a Convent, which was in real life called Greenshield, a Boarding School run by two very resourceful English women, Phyllis Hill and Blanche Whitehall for the benefit of Gurkha Mem's children. Kanchhi, the prominent character of the book as well as the film, was Mr Godden's Gurkha wife, Rumer Godden's step-mother; she is seen being "educated" here, and who was actually the Black Narcissus. In those halcyon days, most of the Managers of the tea estates were married to local Gurkha wives and those Managers had taken pains to tutor their wives to be refined and sophisticated enough to comfortably fit in Western Society. Unfortunately, the film makers have totally ruined the spirit of the Black Narcissus by Indianising it and so a beautiful chapter of the Raj Era where the Brits had interacted with the Gurkhas at social circle in the tea estates of Darjeeling is forever lost to the reading public.
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