
Guerrillas
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $16.07
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Ron Butler
-
By:
-
V. S. Naipaul
About this listen
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power?
Written in the politically turbulent 1970s, Guerrillas takes aim at the sacred cows and myths of revolutionaries - how so many of them "huff and puff", knowing that the house will never blow down. From the safest places come the bravest words.
Naipaul's bleak tale also takes aim at flaws in Marxist and revolutionary ideology - at the idea that one can predict or manipulate how the "revolution" will turn out. His characters are lost souls trying to navigate a postcolonial world where racism, classism, and conflicting ideals create a festering unrest that no one knows how to fix.
©1975 V. S. Naipaul (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an 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.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mimic Men
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Former government minister Ralph Singh is the perpetual outsider: displaced, disillusioned, and now living in exile, Ralph reflects on his earlier life and the searing effects of colonialism. Ralph's constant estrangement sees him ever attempting to fit into various communities, only to find home in more transient spaces. Born on the tropical island of Isabella, he is one of West India's many "Mimic Men".
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an 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.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mimic Men
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Former government minister Ralph Singh is the perpetual outsider: displaced, disillusioned, and now living in exile, Ralph reflects on his earlier life and the searing effects of colonialism. Ralph's constant estrangement sees him ever attempting to fit into various communities, only to find home in more transient spaces. Born on the tropical island of Isabella, he is one of West India's many "Mimic Men".
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Million Mutinies Now
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 24 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.
-
-
AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ
- By JK on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
-
-
Insightful & informative!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-03-24
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Victory
- By: Joseph Conrad
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of the greatest modern writers in world literature comes a magnificent story of love, adventure, and rescue played out against the shimmering South Seas. Alone on a tropical island, a Swedish baron and a beautiful violinist discover the long-lost joys of love. But when two treasure hunters arrive on the beach, the lovers know that evil has invaded their romantic paradise—an evil they are powerless to stop.
-
-
Beautiful, sad and powerful
- By Darwin8u on 01-20-13
By: Joseph Conrad
-
The Caine Mutiny
- By: Herman Wouk
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Having inspired a classic film and Broadway play, The Caine Mutiny is Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life—and mutiny—on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater. It was immediately embraced upon its original publication as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of the Second World War. In the intervening half century, this gripping story has become a perennial favorite, selling millions throughout the world, and claiming the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
-
-
Even Better than the Movie
- By James on 06-20-12
By: Herman Wouk
-
The Armies of the Night
- History as a Novel, the Novel as History
- By: Norman Mailer
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Armies of the Night chronicles the famed October 1967 March on the Pentagon, in which all of the old and new Left - hippies, yuppies, Weathermen, Quakers, Christians, feminists, and intellectuals - came together to protest the Vietnam War. Alongside his contemporaries, Mailer went, witnessed, participated, suffered, and then wrote one of the most stark and intelligent appraisals of the 1960s.
-
-
The last tool left to history
- By Darwin8u on 02-06-19
By: Norman Mailer
-
The Handmaid's Tale
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Claire Danes
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a staged terrorist attack kills the President and most of Congress, the government is deposed and taken over by the oppressive and all-controlling Republic of Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name.
-
-
My Top Pick for 2012
- By Em on 11-30-12
By: Margaret Atwood
-
All the King's Men
- By: Robert Penn Warren
- Narrated by: Michael Emerson
- Length: 20 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The fictionalized account of Louisiana's colorful and notorious governor, Huey Pierce Long, All the King's Men follows the startling rise and fall of Willie Stark, a country lawyer in the Deep South of the 1930s. Beset by political enemies, Stark seeks aid from his right-hand man Jack Burden, who will bear witness to the cataclysmic unfolding of this very American tragedy.
-
-
Beautifully presented
- By Cheimon on 10-12-08
-
Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
-
-
CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
-
The Names
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book that began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses.
-
-
Nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder...
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-17
By: Don DeLillo
-
Hunters in the Dark
- By: Lawrence Osborne
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the novelist the New York Times compares to Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian McEwan, an evocative new work of literary suspense. Adrift in Cambodia, Robert Grieve - pushing 30 and eager to sidestep a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher - decides to go AWOL. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future.
-
-
Graham Greene
- By Foxhuntingman on 02-26-16
By: Lawrence Osborne
-
The Memory of Love
- By: Aminatta Forna
- Narrated by: Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
- Length: 20 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s 1990s civil war, British psychologist Adrian Lockheart comes to work at the Freetown hospital. There he meets a dying elderly patient who confesses to Adrian his past crimes of passion and betrayal.
-
-
Narrator is great - Could not get into the story.
- By Delah on 02-10-12
By: Aminatta Forna
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Magic Seeds
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipaul, one of the world's most acclaimed authors, effortlessly tackles provocative ideas that lesser novelists shy away from and always leaves his audience with something to think about.
-
-
Read Half a Life first
- By Alison on 02-22-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an 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.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
-
Pretty Good
- By Joan on 09-23-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Magic Seeds
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipaul, one of the world's most acclaimed authors, effortlessly tackles provocative ideas that lesser novelists shy away from and always leaves his audience with something to think about.
-
-
Read Half a Life first
- By Alison on 02-22-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an 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.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
-
Pretty Good
- By Joan on 09-23-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
What listeners say about Guerrillas
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- Anonymous User
- 08-27-20
Naipaul's worst book
even the good narration couldn't fix it .. surprised this was released on audible before any of his nonfiction
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kobugi
- 03-13-20
Reactionary Islamophobia 101
First, I'd like to commend the reader. Beautiful work by Ron Butler, who I've listened to before and was just as impressed.
VS Naipaul, however, is one of the most stunningly typical selections for so-called liberal awards committees to elevate. He weaves wondrous prose around his personal views, packages them in a basic, but meandering plot, and sends it at you with an accosting flair. That might sound like a great book. Because, on a technical level, it is skillful craft.
But the context and content cannot be ignored by a conscious audience. The atavism at the heart of the novel is this: Humans are animals, colonization is our nature, and certain races and ideologies are doomed to pursue the wrong methods to accomplish that nature. Blacks rape. Muslims murder. Women seek out violence upon themselves. Rejecting these self-evident truths is either the self-delusion of victor's remorse or the Munchausen's syndrome of the conquered. That is the world of VS Naipaul. That is the thematic propulsion of the novel and, while I'm sure plenty will say "You dont know that, its really about the evils of colonialism," I don't need to dredge up the ugly quotes and he-said/she-said's of Naipaul to prove my point. My good friend Google can do that for you.
Avoid except for dissection and study. But remember, reactionary writing doesn't deserve or need to be bought to be read. If you're looking for colonial writing that is actually good and not just award fodder that the award-giver is too afraid to either criticize or admit they agree, go with Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter by Vargas, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, A Sister to Scheherezade by Assia Djebar, or ESPECIALLY the very similar, but astoundingly better July's People by Nadine Gordimer. July's People is the book that a just world would have given Naipaul's awards.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
6 people found this helpful