Synopsis
In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul, "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian . . . a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."--New York Times.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews
Billed by the publisher as Naipaul's first novel since The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, this can really be regarded as fiction only by the most extremely elastic definition. It is in fact a series of extended essays, meditations and dramatized historical reconstructions that originally carried the perhaps more fitting subtitle "A Sequence." Naipaul ruminates, with all his acute intelligence, on how history shapes personality--and vice versa. The book begins and ends with unexpectedly personal autobiographical sketches of Naipaul: as a boy in Trinidad; as a bright young clerk with a scholarship and a future; as a fledgling writer struggling in London; and, finally, in a later period, in an unnamed East African country where he reencounters a character from his youth. These flank two much longer pieces, which are both poignant and superbly realized portraits of elderly figures whose once-powerful lives were wrecked, more than 200 years apart, by their efforts to exploit, economically and politically, the corner of South America where Trinidad looks across the Bay of Paria to the swampy mainland of Venezuela. Sir Walter Raleigh came twice, with dreams of gold fathered by Columbus, and is seen on his last voyage, about to return to death in the Tower. Francisco Miranda, an astonishing, courtly con man who used, and was used by, both British and Spanish governments as a would-be "liberator" of Latin America in the late 18th century, is seen in fragile Trinidadian exile, exchanging thoughtful, chatty letters with his wife in London. Naipaul's mastery of his material is absolute, and his seemingly effortless, beautifully wrought prose carries the reader to the heart of the mysteries of human destiny. 35,000 first printing.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This work of ``fiction'' from Naipaul (The Enigma of Arrival, 1993, etc.) is really a label-defying tapestry of elements, a fascinating, closely woven blend of history, character study, and autobiography. Naipaul's wonderfully vivid, lyrical descriptions of Trinidad, his homeland, reflect a mind whose every experience seems to have been carefully captured in amber. The theme that repeats throughout is the shifting nature of reality as it is refracted through the eyes and thoughts of those who shaped Trinidadian and South American colonial history--and those who fumble for identity in its aftermath. Naipaul struggles to imagine an earlier, aboriginal Trinidad that preceded the villages and sugar-cane fields and coconut estates of his childhood, attempting to grasp a sense of history that he never felt growing up in the voided legacy of colonialism: The ``idea of a background--and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility- -made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren't responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn't have backgrounds. We didn't have a past.... We were just there, floating.'' Naipaul dissects the dreams and the realities of Spanish and British imperialism, examining ``impresarios of revolution'' such as Venezuelan conqueror Francisco Miranda, whose New World visions included ``fantasies of Incas worthy of Plato's republic, fantasies which (like Columbus's ideas about the New World, and Raleigh's) also contained a dream of a fabulous personal authority.'' By individualizing the colonial and postcolonial experience, Naipaul reveals its human roots: the restless search for identity, for a sense of completion, that drove conquerors and conquered alike--that, as Naipaul tells us, drove him to become a writer. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Naipaul has redefined the genre of historical fiction in this curiously old-fashioned, matter-of-fact, yet utterly eviscerating sequence of linked stories. These tales are told, not dramatized, a subtle narrative style that bespeaks authority and reflection. Our eloquent yet humble narrator and moral guide is an unnamed man of Indian descent who grew up on Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa. He has several preoccupations. One is his slow and painful evolution as a writer; another is the symbiotic relationship between writing and history; and a third is the mercenary age of European exploration and conquest. Trinidad serves as a microcosm of the exploitation, volatile racial overlays, and barely controlled chaos of the so-called New World. Our narrator, who came of age just after World War II, is keenly attuned to the ugly fact that his island's history has been "burnt away." An uneasy mix of transplanted Africans, Indians, and whites circle suspiciously around each other, ripe for some sort of insurrection, a state of affairs as volatile now as it was in the early seventeenth century. Several stories profile revolutionary, but mad and delusional, figures, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, on his desperate journey back across the Atlantic in search of gold and redemption, and the crazy Venezuelan con man Francisco Miranda, who tried to invade South America and establish one immense republic. Each story ponders the betrayals and follies that have wreaked havoc in the nations of the Caribbean and Africa, acts of greed, ignorance, and hatred that are, sadly, quintessentially human. But so is the urge to tell stories, to live and to learn. Donna Seaman
After seven years, Naipaul returns to fiction to explore the sources and implications of his feelings of rootlessness, the realities of the colonial experience, the impact of cultural displacement, and our need to belong. He does so through a series of linked historical narratives. Among them is an imagined vision of Raleigh's desperate but futile search for El Dorado. We are also introduced to Francisco de Miranda, one of the precursors to Bolivar's revolution. We are witness to the irony inherent in the life of Lebrun, a Trinidadian/Panamanian Communist of the 1930s. And then there is Blair, a former co-worker of the narrator in Trinidad, whose African roots prove no help when he becomes an adviser to an East African despot. These are tales of lost souls desperate to find a place at the table but who never quite succeed, leaving them doomed to remain on the fringes of history. A work from a fine and thoughtful storyteller that belongs in all collections of serious fiction.
--David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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