The Mimic Men

by V.S. Naipaul

Book 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375707174
• ISBN13: 9780375707179
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Naipaul painting with all his usual colors

V.S. Naipaul's true genius is found in his travel books (An Area of Darkness, Among the Believers, Beyond Belief) while his novels often suffer the fate of over worn, if generally comfortable shoes: you feel as if you have trodden this ground before. This is not the case with his best works of fiction: A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and In a Free State; here Naipaul allows the stories to tell themselves, even when his superb hand - so masterful and deliberate - is the god of his created world. We get Naipaul but we get Naipaul at his distilled best: pure and unalloyed. The Mimic Men has moments of the genius Naipaul; there his the sense of almost nauseating enclosure that he can generate, as if the story was occurring inside a paper bag; there is the minute dissection of each moment of experience, as if he was an experienced vivisectionist with no qualms about slicing the flesh razor thin for our examination. He paints a world where returns are ever diminishing, and the very effort to continue living seems not a natural pursuit, but somehow supernatural in is scope. If you have the fortitude to read many of Naipaul's novels you will have the fortune to see him hone is craft as he tries to answer four or five vexing existential questions. The question for the reader is, do you want to see this done through four or five often vexing novels? For me, the answer is yes. No one can make you squirm better than Naipaul.

Powerful and lyrical

This was the first book I read by V.S. Naipaul, and it is by far my favorite of his so far. Although I did not initially think that a book dealing with the post-colonial struggle for identity would interest me, I found it to be so much more than that, and completely enthralling. It is a beautifully written, almost lyrical work that weaves back and forth in time to create a compelling portrait of a character who, to be sure, has somewhat "distasteful" aspects to his personality, as mentioned by other reviewers. However, I did not find the distasteful parts to be gratuitous, but rather added to the reader's sense of the humiliation and dull despair the character wades through, the sense of longing for some kind of greatness and finding himself instead stuck in the muck and mire. The unshakable sense that man was made for nobility and greatness and consequently longs for more, while he is interminably caught up in eddies of revolting, degrading, and pointless behavior. Though the book did not offer much in the way of hope (which I nonetheless most definitely think exists), it provided an eloquent picture of the state of humanity in the face of one man. I definitely recommend this book.

Mimicry

Nobel-prize winning Naipaul has written in The Mimic Men a wonderful discourse on the post-colonial search for indentity. Growing up between two worlds, those of the colonizer and of the colonized, the main character struggles to develop a cohsive self as a child, attempting to reconcile western values and beliefs with his traditional Hindu background.The trials of the character continue through adulthood as he returns to his native Caribbean island with a new English wife, earns a status as one of the island's elite, and attempts to become one with his past as helps incite rebellion on the island against colonial forces.The prose is beautiful, and Naipaul's power of observation and description are astounding. He truly gets to the heart of the post-colonial condition is this novel, one which will surely become a stable of post-colonial literature studies. Recommended highly to all.

austerely brilliant

This is an extremely melancholy story of a former minister of a small caribbean country, who ruminates in dingy exile on his life. As he stumbles through life, an intelligent and competent man but out of his depth, the characer is so painfully real that I had to distance myself from it at times. One of the great original voices, Naipaul has a genius for serving up exotic characters and helping us to empathise with them. It is illmninating and a good way to understand the Third World, even if Naipal is a bit too pessimistic; his peccadillos, almost whiny, form a large part of his novels.

Beginning the Journey

This novel confronts the effects of colonialism on national and individual identity and character. This is a prominent focal point of Sir Naipaul's work. The central character of this work is an isolated and deposed island politician writing his story in the anonymnity of his London refuge: a hotel chosen for its distinctly shabby and monastic qualities. This once flamboyant and able man is now impelled,as perhaps his last significant act, to write his story.This is done without emotion, even one so shallow as self pity. Yet the story is told in a vivid and brutal style with the honesty of one driven by the need to confess a crime.This novel expresses a complex theme through a character so well developed that he tells the story of a society whose identity is dominated by not having one.