The Village in the Jungle Paperback – April 28, 2020

I'm reading a bunch of books about Sri Lanka in preparation for a trip there. This was one of the most authentic and beautiful. It reads like Robert Conrad...cf Heart of Darkness but yet more simple and pure...like Hemingway. The footnotes were very helpful and with the Kindle version there was absolutely no trouble reading the text as other reviews mentioned,

I read this book prior to a trip to Sri Lanka, so it was quite meaningful. Very well written. However the version I bought was a scanned copy of a library book from UC Berkeley. The image quality was poor and font was so small it was hard to read. Neither the font size nor the light scale could be adjusted which are two good reasons to read e-books in the first place. I won't fall for that again.

everything else was just fine, the quality of the book, etc. At the time of purchase I also ordered 2 other books from separate sellers which arrived almost a week sooner. Oh well, great book, good condition!

The book begins with wonderful prose about the jungle. I bought it on my Kindle because other reviewers said the print was too small. I thought I could enlarge the print on the Kindle edition, but could not. I am searching for a paperback edition which I can read.

The Village in the Jungle is a thoroughly engaging novel, a story set in southern Ceylon (Sri Lanka) around 1910. The book is well written, with a good brisk pace and a suitably sized cast of characters, several of whom are fully developed, complex. As much as in any Jane Austen novel, the basic melodrama depends on the charms of two attractive sisters and the men who desire them. It's also a novel of manners, but here the manners are those of life in the jungle. Woolf was fascinated by the Sinhalese during his 7 years as a colonial administrator (1904-1911) in southern Ceylon, and he kept detailed notes of his observations as he moved about his district.A Woolf-like magistrate appears in the novel, booking a self-confessed murderer from the jungle. The magistrate is shown in a flattering light: he's intelligent and perceptive, speaking fluent Sinhalese. As the exhausted man sleeps in front of him, the magistrate asks his assistant's opinion of the case. His assistant replies that the jungle people are ignorant savages. Then the Woolf character says: "I rather doubt it. You don't help the psychologist much. This man now: I expect he's a quiet sort of man. All he wanted was to be left alone, poor devil." Psychologist! Woolf wrote this in 1912, the year he resigned from colonial service to marry Virginia Stephen, who encouraged him to write this book. Woolf and the other Apostles at Cambridge were early converts to Freud. The Hogarth Press published the first English translations of Freud's works.I believe this book is the earliest literary work to break from the Victorian glorification of imperialism, trumpeted so successfully by Rudyard Kipling. Far from being 'the white man's burden,' colonialism is here just another burden on natives already struggling with plenty of troubles of their own. Woolf's jungle is Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' come to life, for the people as well as for the animals. The people are never far from starvation. "For the rule of the jungle is first fear... and behind the fear is always the hunger and the thirst, and behind the hunger and the thirst fear again." But Woolf incorporates another level as well, beyond the objective Darwinian reality. He shows the natives' feelings about the jungle, their behavioral adjustments: their psychology! It's quite remarkable. And hugely successful.This book must have had a big impact on Joyce Cary, who served as District Officer in Nigeria (1914-1920), and also came to see colonialism from the native's perspective. It's especially evident in "The African Witch" (1936). In "An American Visitor" (1933) the colonial administrator is determined not to allow Christian missionaries into the country, as they would only debase and destroy the philosophical underpinnings so crucial to maintaining the coherence of society. (It is extremely unfortunate that the British, trying to maintain their hold on Ceylon, deliberately set the Tamils and the Sinhalese against each other. The upshot was the brutal, incredibly destructive, civil war that lasted 26 years.)

An engrossing tale, inspired by the author's time as assistant governor in the east of Sri Lanka. Set in a small village, it concerns the taciturn loner, Silindu, and his motherless twin daughters. Silindu is an outsider in his village, and prefers to spend his time away hunting in the jungle. But life is hard and desperately poor, and he finds himself at odds with the village headman, who has the power to make his life difficult...Love, hatred, greed, plotting, religion, superstition all come into this tale; and over it all the British administration, whose taxes and permits make life that bit harder for the peasants.Having recently visited this area of Sri Lanka, I really felt Woolf's writing brought the area to life ;'The jungle surged forward over and blotted out the village up to the very walls of her hut...Its breath was hot and heavy...it closed with its shrubs and bushes and trees, with the impenetrable disorder of its thorns and its creepers, over the rice-fields and the tanks.'In a short story, 'Pearls and Swine' which appears in my (Eland) edition, Woolf expresses some of his opinions on the shortcomings of colonial rule.

This is a great novel, one of the few that really enters into the life of the native villagers of Sri Lanka in the early 20th century (and before). It is very oppressive and dark, and captures a kind of inexorableness of both the surrounding jungle and the internal hates and loves of tightly bound village life. It perhaps assimilates too starkly the natives with the ambient natural world (they are likened to the animal realm from time to time), but then Woolf was a white colonial administrator (and the colonial administration doesn't come off all that well either). The darkness and oppression of the story are offset by the fabulous writing which gives the whole thing a kind of glow.It is interesting that this novel has never achieved classic status, probably because there are no western heroes, and nothing really redemptive. But parts of it are in the same league as A Passage to India.

This is a portrait of a Sinhalese family in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), dwelling in the titular village and scraping a living from hunting and cultivating a small plot. Silindu is regarded as a little mad, wandering around the jungle and believing he can see demons and hear animals talk. Nonetheless he fascinates his two little girls, who grow up to be desired by the men of the village.In this tiny community no deed goes unseen and no grudge is forgotten. Silindu's life seems to him to be overshadowed by doom; some evil is ever harrying him. The women, expected to be powerless, gain little by attempting to exercise what freedom they do have. With scheming headmen, moneylenders, medicine men and gossips, village life is claustrophobic and cruel, and yet moving to any other place or way of living seems impossible for the inhabitants. Contact with the systems of modernity - administrators, courts and prisons - baffles them, whereas their own jungle world is one they at least understand.This is an unhappy saga in which no course of action leads anyone to peace. Yet the novel respects the villagers' striving and takes no pleasure in their fate. Just as the jungle is constantly encroaching on the village, so too it invades the spirits of those who reside there and extends, in its seething mystery, into the surrounding machineries of the state. It is brutal and unconquerable, and they can never be free from it.

Set in former Ceylon, a family hack out a fragile existence in the jungle, unprotected by the oblivious colonial administration against the threats of their malevolent neighbours.Somewhere I read praise of this and was intrigued to discover what and how the husband of the more famous Virginia would write. It is fascinatingly different from her books in every way. I can’t do better than quote the first paragraph of the ‘afterword’ by the author’s biographer Christopher Ondaatje: “[This] sits with Burmese Days by George Orwell as the very best of the literature written by servants of the British Empire in the twentieth century. It is emphatically not about what the East means to white people; it does not fantasise ... from a European perspective. It shows a remarkable, deep empathy for the hard lives of the poor Sinhalese jungle dwellers and their psychology, and gives a devastating portrayal of the irrelevance of the colonial regime to their needs and world. Written ... after serving as a colonial officer [there], it arose directly from the misgivings Woolf came to feel about the imperial enterprise.”It was accepted for publication in 1913, two years before Virginia self-published her first novel. It was highly praised then and has become a loved part of the literary culture of Sri Lanka today. It has no literary pretension or solipsism (apologies, Virginia), just skilful, knowledgeable, humane storytelling. So glad I read it. Respect.My edition includes a short story, Pearls and Swine, a brilliant example of ‘showing, not telling’ how misconceived, immoral and offensive Britain’s colonial notions are.

This is such an unhappy story about a village in Sri Lanka and all that goes wrong for the good but poor people and it goes very, very wrong, that I could hardly bear it, yet it is a picture and I'm sure a true one from when Leonard Woolf was a Resident magistrate there. so one can reward it as a historical picture, but still a distressing one.

I bought this book while researching titles for holiday reading in Sri Lanka. I could not put it down. Amazing characters in a wonderfully woven story. A true classic.

Great book for those who interested.