An elliptical, lyrical, vividly descriptive autobiographical account of what it's like for an Indian writer from Trinidad to settle in the rural west of England. When Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the judges commented that THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL provides an "unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighborhoods.''
The time is World War II, the setting a derelict street in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain. In this tender early novel, Naipaul renders the residents' lives (and the legends that arise around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
The three stories in this book, "The Suffrage of Elvira, A Flag on the Island" and "Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion, " take readers from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London, all in Naipaul's bizarre international style.
In a corner of India untouched by anti-colonial agitation, Willy Chandran's father stood at odds with the world - aspiring to greatness whilst living out the dreary life marked out for him by his ancestors. In an attempt to defy his past, he marries a low-caste woman only to find himself at the mercy of his own fury. From this unhappy union the utterly compelling character of Willy Chandran emerges, oddly like his father, naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. He is drawn to England and the immigrant community of post war London, its dingy West End clubs, and sexual encounters, and even to the eccentric milieu of the English writer. But it is Willy's first experience of love that might bring him the fulfillment he so desperately seeks.His wife Ana leads him to her home, a province of Portuguese Africa, a country whose inhabitants are all uncertainly living out the last days of colonialism. Naipaul delineates the relationship between father and son with wonderful clarity and compassion; the comic brilliance of the London scenes and the penetrating descriptions of Africa are hard to beat.
Just 40, Ralph Singh - a disgraced colonial minister exiled from Isabella, the Caribbean island of his birth - writes his autobiography in a genteel hotel in a run-down London suburb. The author also wrote "The Mystic Masseur", "A House for Mr Biswas" and "The Middle Passage".
Naipaul describes the effects of British, French, and Dutch colonialism on the history and culture of the Caribbean. Naipaul based his observations on a seven-month tour of the area, a grant from the
No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people--Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" Ý117¨-- are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital Ý111¨. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. Ý111-12, 120, 130-1, 150, 178, 220-40¨ And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best
