| V.(Vidiadhar) S.(Surajprasad) Naipaul's "Fantasy and Ruins"
is an insightful look into what "British" has come to mean over these past hundred years.
On my first reading I was struct with his balanced prose, observations, and arrange of
related topics in both literature and architecture. He questions and contrasts the
"Britishness" of Trinidad(his home country) and India(thru which he is traveling). At the base of Imperial England he find a lack of
seriousness and purpose that was destined to render comic and to finally destroy their
England of India. He sees that what may start as genuine may end in self-destruction.
For me, his insights have a nearly Hegelean quality, as he traces the historic unfolding
of British conscousness as it comes into and out of empire.
Born in Trinidad in 1932, he spent four years(1950-55) at University College, Oxford. His novels include The Mystic Masseur (1957; John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959; Somerset Maugham Award), A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963; Hawthornden Prize), The Mimic Men (1967; W.H. Smith Award 1968). A Flag on the Island (1967), a collection of short stories, was followed by four novels, In A Free State (1971; Booker Prize), Guerillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987). V.S. Naipaul has also written nine works of non-fiction, the most recent of which was India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), an engrossing account of the changes taking place in modern India. V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood in the 1990 New Year's Honours List for services to literature, and in 1993 was the first recipient of the £30,000 David Cohen British Literature Prize. He is the Booker McConnell Prize winner for 1971 for "In a Free State". "In a Free State is a sequence of five works - two short stories (the prologue and the epilogue), two forty page novellas and a one hundred and forty page short novel - linked by a common theme. All are about individuals stranded in foreign countries and confronted by alien cultures: in "One out of Many" an Indian servant is almost accidentally transported to Washington, where he finds a niche for himself but remains profoundly alienated from the world around him; "Tell Me Who to Kill" is the tragic story of a West Indian who moves to London; the novel "In a Free State" is about expatriate English civil servants in a recently independent African state torn by civil war; and the epilogue and prologue present the more detached view of an experienced traveller writing in his journal. In a Free State is one of the best works of fiction I have read that deals with the subject of cultural incommensurability and the broken symmetry of colonial relationships. Naipaul's use of multiple stories helps him present a more balanced perspective than a straightforward novel would have allowed, and the subject is one he is at home with. His prose is up to its usual high standard, and there can have been little surprise when In a Free State won the 1971 Booker Prize." A book review by Danny Yee, 1994
SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA Literature: a bibliography go to http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEAL/SouthAsia/lit.html
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