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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Elegant prose but not involving,
By A Customer
This review is from: Mimic Men (Mass Market Paperback)
The story is set on a fictional Caribbean isle and has to do with the displacement of a British Indian who is in search of his cultural and spiritual identity. The inner angst resulting from the end of British colonialism and its aftermath are explored here in elegant, poetic prose. But it's hard to relate to a self-pitying main character who visits the local whorehouse on a regular basis. Many profound thoughts emerge about the nature of identity and meaning in a post-colonial world, but sometimes the thoughts get lost in the stylized langauge. I personally don't relate to these themes but if you feel you do this will be a rewarding reading experience from one of the most respected modern English authors. The low star rating is simply because I need a tense plot to keep my interest.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beginning the Journey,
By
This review is from: Mimic Men (Mass Market Paperback)
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.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Naipaul painting with all his usual colors,
By Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Mimic Men: A Novel (Paperback)
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.
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