欧宝娱乐

This is a somewhat slow, silent story of a young boy growing up in a poor village in Bengal. It follows Apu and Durga, (two children who are poor even by the standards of their village mates), as they search for wild berries and leaves, steal mangoes from their neighbors, get beaten, play cowries, get lost, and discover trains. Their lives are simple and their stories simply told. You get a sense both of the rarified, natural beauty that village life holds, and of the ways in which it grinds people down, keeps them narrow, and strips them of their dreams.

The other interesting thing about the story is how tangential British presence is in the story. We hear about a now defunct factory near the village, we see the train tracks, and we see a somewhat ridiculous Westernized family putting on airs. But ultimately, the world they live in is so small that Shorbojoya, the mother of Apu and Durga, has never been to a temple 6 miles away in the 10 years she lived in the village. It is a kind of pre-Colonial life that could have been described almost identically if it had been set in the 1600's.

Durga, who is constantly derided, often beaten, never quite loved -- is especially heartbreaking. Because she is a girl, she never gets as much food, is berated for not doing housework, is never taught to read, and lives a jungly, solitary existence. In other ways, the story plainly captures the ways in which women were powerless, less valued, and utterly mistreated.

This story was adapted into a famous Satyajit Ray movie. In some ways I like the movie better, because film seems a better medium to capture the twittering, dripping sounds of the forest, or the quiet, long shots of fields of waving grass.

Still, I would recommend reading the book because it captures the way a child sees the world in a particularly charming and unpretentious manner.