The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

Overview

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Enigma of Arrival comes a profound novel of cultural displacement, masterfully evoking a colonial man’s experience in a postcolonial world.

“No one else … seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the very voice of exile.” —The New York Review of Books

Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman. But it is the return home and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governed nation that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375707179
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/14/2001
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,023,381
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

V.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.
 
His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.
 
In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Wiltshire, England

Date of Birth:

August 17, 1932

Place of Birth:

Chaguanas, Trinidad

Education:

Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, 1943-48; B.A., University College, Oxford, 1953

What People are Saying About This

Paul Theroux

The novel's pattern is amazingly balanced...It is dense and complex, but it resembles less a sold chunk of a man's history than an elaborate circling syllogry of memory, crossing and recrossing.

Editorial Reviews

A Tolstoyan spirit.... The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

“Ambitious and successful.” —The Times (London)

From the Publisher

"He is the most compelling master of social truth that I know of in the contemporary novel." -- The New York Times Book Review

Alfred Kazin

Rarely do listeners encounter as unique a protagonist as Naipaul’s Ralph Singh. He lives in London, though he grew up in the Caribbean and even shared ruling power for a time on the island with an Afro-Caribbean politician. Sam Dastor’s strong narration enlivens Singh as he remembers his childhood and political career. Dastor ensures that Singh’s disillusionment becomes evident as he returns to his politically torn island home. Dastor’s low tone sometimes hovers between thoughtful and monotonous, a tone that befits Naipaul’s story. Spanning 20 years as Singh travels from London to the Caribbean and back amid a failed marriage and vacillating political power, the novel examines the complicated social and ethnic struggles of its time. A.G.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2017 - AudioFile