The Mimic Men - Softcover

Naipaul, V. S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140029400 ISBN 13: 9780140029406

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1976

Synopsis

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".

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

A profound novel of cultural displacement, The Mimic Men masterfully evokes a colonial man's experience in a postcolonial world.
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.

From the Back Cover:

“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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0140029400
• ISBN 13: 9780140029406
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256