En Al límite de la fe , Naipaul se interna en cuatro países -Indonesia, Pakistán, Irán y Malasia- conversos al Islam, pero no árabes. Como otras obras del autor, puede considerarse libro de viajes y de relatos, en el que se entrelazan personajes y situaciones para formar un escenario fascinante. Segun propias palabras de Naipaul, no se trata de un libro de opinion, sino sobre personas, lo cual no le impide manifestar con bastante claridad su postura desfavorable hacia el integrismo islamico, si bien con la mirada a la vez fria y calida de quien, mas que juzgar, desea observar y conocer.
Una visión de la India hecha sin prejuicios ni sentimentalismos. No la habitual descripción de un país exótico sino una recreación de una sociedad compleja y contradictoria en la que la modernidad se teje sobre un fondo de solidas tradiciones.
The narrator tells the story of Ganesh, who rises from a lowly job as masseur to become a healer and then a powerful politician. Finally, he is corrupted and disgusted by the realities of the political life. This novel was the winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1958 and was made into a film in 2002.
In awarding V. S. Naipaul the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy called him a "literary circumnavigator" and a "modern philosophe." Both tags seem spot-on, given Naipaul's gift for describing -- in both his fictional and nonfictional studies of India, Africa, and beyond -- the humor and pathos of cultural collisions.
In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one manan Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
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
