From: Julie Corsaro <juliecorsaro2>
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:42:58 -0400

I recently read a powerful anti-war novel, Kipling's Choice, by Belgium novelist Geert Spillebben, translated from French by Terese Edelstein
(Houghton Mifflin). It's a fictionalized accountof the brutal death of Rudyard Kipling's 18-year-old son John during World War I. As I read the book, I thought about its timeliness given the war in Irag, the deaths and terrible maiming of many soldiers and the deception of some of our most influential politicians.

John Kipling is slight, sickly and has terrible vision like his father. Still, the elder Kipling uses his tremendous influence to insure that his only son will have the military opportunity that he was denied. The spare, immediate, lyrical text flows smoothly between John's horrific death on a Flander's battlefield and his privileged yet stifling adolescence under his father's watchful eye. Kipling's patriotism and fervent war poetry rallied the young men of Britain. Yet, his son's death left him a broken man, guilty and embittered, who wrote, "If any question why we died; Tell them, because our fathers lied."

Julie Corsaro







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Received on Wed 29 Jun 2005 01:42:58 PM CDT