The Mimic Men

With a preface by the author.

V. S. Naipaul''s The Mimic Men is a profound, moving and often humorous novel that evokes a colonial man’s experience in the post-colonial world.

Born of Indian heritage, raised in the British-dependent Caribbean island of Isabella, and educated in England, forty-year-old Ralph Singh has spent a lifetime struggling against the torment of cultural displacement. Now in exile from his native country, he has taken up residence at a quaint hotel in a London suburb, where he is writing his memoirs in an attempt to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the cultural paradoxes and tainted fantasies of his colonial childhood and later life: his attempts to fit in at school, his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman. But it is the return to Isabella and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governing nation – every kind of racial fantasy taking wing – that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.

‘A Tolstoyan spirit . . . The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist’ John Updike, New Yorker

• | Author: V.S. Naipaul
• | Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Oct 07, 2011
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9780330522922
• | ISBN-10: 0330522922