Customer Reviews

The Mimic Men

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am a confirmed Naipaul fan, but I was not overly impressed with the "Mimic Men". There seems to be 3 separate themes here that are better expressed in other novels by Naipaul. All three themes are lightly treated, disjointed, and lack cohesion. The first topic is his uncanny ability to dissect an absurd culture and acquaint the reader with the mentality of the characters within that culture. A prime example of his brilliance can be found in "Miguel Street". The second theme is racial and political turmoil faced by the colonial islanders. Here again this issue is better handled in more depth in "Guerrillas". The third subject is the "rootlessness" themes of the narrator (Naipaul), a man without a nation if you will, trying to find himself in some other culture.

Naipaul's true genius can be found in his travel journalism and storytelling novels. Try reading "A Bend in the River", "A house for Mr. Biswis", and "An Area of Darkness". Oh, and by the way, he formulates incredibly juicy sex scenes in all of his novels!

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.

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.

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.

One of the most boring and unattractive books I have ever read. What an unfortunate idea to give a running commentary on the events rather than let the reader enjoy the events themselves. I often wondered whether I was reading a badly written essay rather than a novel. Instead of a good story about the racial and political complexities of a colonial (and post-colonial) society you get an exercise in style. Self-indulgent sophistication makes this a tedious read. No more Naipaul for me, thankyou.