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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Acute but Distasteful., 25 Oct 2001
This is one of Naipaul's earlier novels and in it he addresses many of the same themes that occupy his latter, and masterful "A Place in the World". These include the transition of a multi-ethnic Caribbean society from colony to independence; the culture-shock of a colonial exposed to higher education in Europe; post-independence power struggles and, ultimately, failure, corruption and slow descent into near chaos arising from lack of any dynamic other than lust for power and wealth. The cultural impoverishment of Asian communities cut off from their cultural roots are poignantly described here, as in much of Naipauls's other work (including the masterful "A House for Mr.Biswas", where the treatment is tragic-comic). As always Naipaul's evocation of place and character is acute, bleak and wholly convincing. This said however, the major criticism may be less one of the book than of this particular reader. There is only so much reality that can be comfortably absorbed in a single novel. The fact that the first-person narrator, unsparing in his confessions of mean-mindedness, lechery, callousness and greed, is so contemptible a human-being makes it very hard for the reader not to feel soiled by the time the whole sordid tale is done. I first read this book fourteen years ago, and retained a very unpleasant memory of it for this reason. On re-reading I found that my earlier perception was sustained. It is a splendid literary achievement - but a very distasteful one.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Bend In the River II, 31 July 2002
OK, so it's pretty unjust to say a book of such a writer as Naipaul is a sequel to another book of his; with that I can easily agree, don't take the title of this review seriously then. But what I wanted to emphasize here is that Naipaul generally describes One Man's Journey in his books - and while 'A Bend In the River' was a chapter concerning this man's Escape, 'The Mimic Men' deals with his Arrival and Return. And it really doesn't matter that the countries change: the protagonist remains the same; it doesn't matter that the 'sequel' was written before the 'part I': Naipaul jumps back and forth in the history of his own life and it is the reader's task to sort it out correctly... and this task, I must add, is tremendous fun. Personally I consider 'The Mimic Men' one of Naipaul's greatest novels - in fact it's even better than the more famous 'A Bend In the River'.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Familiar pessimism about the future of newly independent nations, 18 April 2008
Once again exile and cultural dislocation, and the mess of independence, are the principal themes in V S Naipaul's early and acerbic commentary on the ironies and paradoxes of post-colonialism. This time, the narrator, Ralph Singh, an ex-colonial minister from a small Caribbean island, ensconced in London, writes his memoirs from a room in a suburban hotel. His writings rock back and forth between the present and the past in an attempt to explore the meaning of his childhood and the relationship with his family, his education, his brief marriage to a ridiculous white woman and above all his political career in Isabella, the island of his youth, during its formative post-independent years. All the criticisms are here that he has made of his own native Trinidad: the ideological bankruptcy, greed and stupidity of the new post-colonial elite resulting from an inferiority complex in relation to their colonial masters, the abandonment of traditional cultures and values perceived as inherently inferior, and a desire by both communities (African and South Asian) to imitate, to mimic, the behaviour and mores of their white ex-rulers. The result is an ill-disciplined and poorly governed country, with the familiar racial and social tensions that are characteristic of that region and of Naipaul's novels, a place without social cohesion or any meaningful sense of direction. The chaos of Singh's own mean-spirited and selfish life is mapped over that of his unruly country to give a dispiriting pessimism about the future of nations seeking a fresh start after the demise of colonialism. But then this was written in 1967 - and by V S Naipaul.
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by J M Coetzee
by John McLeod
by Michael Ondaatje
by V.S. Naipaul
by Chinua Achebe
