Scan barcode
lindseysparks's review against another edition
Oddly, I liked all of the stories in this except for In a Free State. I didn't realize this was a story collection at first. The back of the edition I have summarizes In a Free State only. It doesn't say and other storiea or something similar anywhere. So I was very confused initially
srbolton's review against another edition
4.0
Naipaul is always a challenge for me. His writing is so dense, often beautiful, but generally free of joy.
It is bothersome to ponder what goes on in the mind of an author who can narrate with such depth the perspectives of so many unredeemable characters. Is this novel an impressive work of art? Undoubtedly, but I’m not likely to recommend it to any friends.
It is bothersome to ponder what goes on in the mind of an author who can narrate with such depth the perspectives of so many unredeemable characters. Is this novel an impressive work of art? Undoubtedly, but I’m not likely to recommend it to any friends.
florismeertens's review against another edition
2.0
Een boek waar ik onmogelijk een sterke mening over kan vormen, simpelweg omdat ik er zo weinig uit heb gehaald. "Een der velen", de eerste van drie novellen, liet nog het meeste indruk op me na. Een treffend, zij het nogal basaal verhaal over een Indiase migrant en zijn zoektocht naar enerzijds onafhankelijkheid, anderzijds een thuis. "Vertel me wie ik moet vermoorden" was niet erg opmerkelijk afgezien van het einde, een prachtige overdenking over wie de vijand, wie "de ander" is (en dat is sowieso een van mijn favoriete thema's). Maar verreweg het langste verhaal "In een staat van vrijheid" bevatte niets dat mijn aandacht erbij kon houden. Het proza was onbevredigend en oppervlakkig, de personages waren niet levendig, de thematiek over vrijheid en neutraliteit kwam niet aan.
Aan degenen die dit boek (of iets anders van Naipaul) gelezen hebben en het wel konden waarderen: Ik hoor graag wat jullie er zo goed aan vonden.
Aan degenen die dit boek (of iets anders van Naipaul) gelezen hebben en het wel konden waarderen: Ik hoor graag wat jullie er zo goed aan vonden.
zoe243's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
marysues's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
bub_9's review against another edition
3.0
I'm going to give it three stars even though it was rather enjoyable for two reasons - while I appreciated the concept of a deliberate deviation from the traditional form of a novel, I didn't always think all the stories were equally effective; and while the author did handle the intricacies of a postcolonial society well, I didn't always feel that the postcolonial concern was necessarily articulated as effectively. Nonetheless, Naipaul has a genuinely riveting way with prose - I don't often encounter literary fiction as readable as this.
I did enjoy the central, eponymous novella of the book - In a Free State is written in such a flowing manner that the single day of driving it takes over a hundred pages to explore never feel dreary, yet it is equally unflinching in its characterisation of the two 'protagonists', Linda - a more stereotypically civilising, white-saviour-complexesque colonial wife who is open in her disdain and disregard for not just the natives, but even the native administration, and Bobby, a gay man (while I suppose that Naipaul's depiction of him as gay is to further starken the contrast between what we would expect of him and his true beliefs, his sexuality is characterised in a cliched and clumsy manner, which detracts from the otherwise superbly nuanced, detailed vignettes in the rest of the novella) who appears at first more compassionate and sympathetic to the natives, disapproving of Linda's overtly communicated prejudice. What Naipaul does is to subvert this outward behaviour, exposing instead that Bobby is deeply insecure in his power (witness the horrific incident where he goes berserk at a petrol station), unbelievably patronising and infantilising towards the natives (evident in his mockery of the natives' paunchy physiques), and is ultimately still overtly prone to exoticisation in his attitudes towards Africa - towards his drives and the scenery in general. He further depicts Bobby as evidently a complex, thinking man who has received a top-class education and has thought enough about the world to have gone through a breakdown, yet who has ultimately failed to leave behind his colonialist impulses. In this Naipaul already produces a masterly critique of the continuing imperialist prejudice against the natives; yet what sets In a Free State apart for me was the meticulous (and meticulously horrifying) brushstrokes with which Naipaul paints the fictional country Bobby and Linda are placed within. This is a thinly veiled version of Uganda, a country riven by ethnic feuds and on the verge of a cataclysmic dictatorship with horrific human consequences foreshadowed. We see all this from a distance - the smoke from the burning villages behind the mountains, the vague, alluded-to murder of the King by the President's men, the cavalier, nasty behaviour of the Army on the road, even the implicit danger in a roadblock. The remove affords us some space for consideration yet there is a frightening clarity to the terror that we know will imminently unfold. A curious moment is near the end of their drive, when they witness soldiers belonging to the tribe of the President rounding up civilians belonging to the tribe of the King - a horrific foreshadowing of the Rwandan genocide. While Linda's desperation to ignore the plain violation of basic rights because she thinks so little of the natives speaks volumes of her total lack of compassion, more curious is Bobby's response. Bobby, ever so righteous, decides in his presumption to wield his authority as a government officer to demand to speak to their officer to halt the violence, and yet his sanctimony is revealed to be utterly empty in his violent abuse at the hands of the soldiers. Ultimately, he runs away and makes a desperate, desperately pathetic escape - one that reminds us how the colonial powers merely destroyed these societies and then abandoned them when the inevitable chaos set in. It's genuinely a stunning read, and a surprisingly poignant commentary on the struggle of these former colonies.
The book also subverts the traditional form of the novel, packing in two other shorter stories - the first of which, One out of Many, was more effective in its conception (highlighting the futility of so-called freedom and the utter estrangement of a supposedly lucky Indian who has become economically successful in America to an extent he could never have imagined) than in execution, with the story occasionally coming across as awkward and clunky in a way that the main novella never does; the second of which, Tell Me Who to Kill, suffers from the opposite problem, with its narrator presenting a heartbreaking (though in the alternation of poor grammar and fanciful language not entirely convincing) background which makes his alienation all too clear yet turning on an oddly conceived plot point (an accidental murder?) that detracts from the searing pain of the character.
Finally, there are two more tiny wisps of stories, a Prologue and an Epilogue, both of which happen to have to do with Egypt. The first follows an English tramp who is abused senselessly by others on board a ship to Egypt in retaliation to his strange incomprehensibility, one that is not summarised easily but seems to revolve around a certain bereftness coupled with a rather delusional self-importance. Obviously, this functions as a metaphor for post-imperial Britain, and was rather provocative in its illustration of the imperial perspective, even if I did find it too oblique on a first reading. By contrast, the Epilogue is far more immediate in its depiction of displacement, with the narrator, the Egyptian children, the Egyptian master, the Chinese circus and even the Egyptian soldier all caught up in this swirl of inhumanity and alienation. Again, though, it's simply too brief to have any sizeable impact on its own.
Nonetheless, even if the supporting narratives cannot compare in their completeness to the main novella, the deliberate contestation Naipaul makes against the traditional novel form achieves two objectives - firstly, he avoids the danger of the traditional immigrant novel which prizes Home above all others, instead providing a much more bracing, realistic (if pessimistic) view of the post-colonial state as inherently fragile and disturbed; secondly, instead of a simple power dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed, the coloniser and the colonised, he gives us a far more multifaceted look at the nature of displacement, suffered by many characters on many levels, conjoined and in conversation through the various levels of narratives.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the main novella, and yet while I appreciated the concept of supporting narratives and a multitude of narratives, I did think that they weakened the overall enjoyability of the book.
I did enjoy the central, eponymous novella of the book - In a Free State is written in such a flowing manner that the single day of driving it takes over a hundred pages to explore never feel dreary, yet it is equally unflinching in its characterisation of the two 'protagonists', Linda - a more stereotypically civilising, white-saviour-complexesque colonial wife who is open in her disdain and disregard for not just the natives, but even the native administration, and Bobby, a gay man (while I suppose that Naipaul's depiction of him as gay is to further starken the contrast between what we would expect of him and his true beliefs, his sexuality is characterised in a cliched and clumsy manner, which detracts from the otherwise superbly nuanced, detailed vignettes in the rest of the novella) who appears at first more compassionate and sympathetic to the natives, disapproving of Linda's overtly communicated prejudice. What Naipaul does is to subvert this outward behaviour, exposing instead that Bobby is deeply insecure in his power (witness the horrific incident where he goes berserk at a petrol station), unbelievably patronising and infantilising towards the natives (evident in his mockery of the natives' paunchy physiques), and is ultimately still overtly prone to exoticisation in his attitudes towards Africa - towards his drives and the scenery in general. He further depicts Bobby as evidently a complex, thinking man who has received a top-class education and has thought enough about the world to have gone through a breakdown, yet who has ultimately failed to leave behind his colonialist impulses. In this Naipaul already produces a masterly critique of the continuing imperialist prejudice against the natives; yet what sets In a Free State apart for me was the meticulous (and meticulously horrifying) brushstrokes with which Naipaul paints the fictional country Bobby and Linda are placed within. This is a thinly veiled version of Uganda, a country riven by ethnic feuds and on the verge of a cataclysmic dictatorship with horrific human consequences foreshadowed. We see all this from a distance - the smoke from the burning villages behind the mountains, the vague, alluded-to murder of the King by the President's men, the cavalier, nasty behaviour of the Army on the road, even the implicit danger in a roadblock. The remove affords us some space for consideration yet there is a frightening clarity to the terror that we know will imminently unfold. A curious moment is near the end of their drive, when they witness soldiers belonging to the tribe of the President rounding up civilians belonging to the tribe of the King - a horrific foreshadowing of the Rwandan genocide. While Linda's desperation to ignore the plain violation of basic rights because she thinks so little of the natives speaks volumes of her total lack of compassion, more curious is Bobby's response. Bobby, ever so righteous, decides in his presumption to wield his authority as a government officer to demand to speak to their officer to halt the violence, and yet his sanctimony is revealed to be utterly empty in his violent abuse at the hands of the soldiers. Ultimately, he runs away and makes a desperate, desperately pathetic escape - one that reminds us how the colonial powers merely destroyed these societies and then abandoned them when the inevitable chaos set in. It's genuinely a stunning read, and a surprisingly poignant commentary on the struggle of these former colonies.
The book also subverts the traditional form of the novel, packing in two other shorter stories - the first of which, One out of Many, was more effective in its conception (highlighting the futility of so-called freedom and the utter estrangement of a supposedly lucky Indian who has become economically successful in America to an extent he could never have imagined) than in execution, with the story occasionally coming across as awkward and clunky in a way that the main novella never does; the second of which, Tell Me Who to Kill, suffers from the opposite problem, with its narrator presenting a heartbreaking (though in the alternation of poor grammar and fanciful language not entirely convincing) background which makes his alienation all too clear yet turning on an oddly conceived plot point (an accidental murder?) that detracts from the searing pain of the character.
Finally, there are two more tiny wisps of stories, a Prologue and an Epilogue, both of which happen to have to do with Egypt. The first follows an English tramp who is abused senselessly by others on board a ship to Egypt in retaliation to his strange incomprehensibility, one that is not summarised easily but seems to revolve around a certain bereftness coupled with a rather delusional self-importance. Obviously, this functions as a metaphor for post-imperial Britain, and was rather provocative in its illustration of the imperial perspective, even if I did find it too oblique on a first reading. By contrast, the Epilogue is far more immediate in its depiction of displacement, with the narrator, the Egyptian children, the Egyptian master, the Chinese circus and even the Egyptian soldier all caught up in this swirl of inhumanity and alienation. Again, though, it's simply too brief to have any sizeable impact on its own.
Nonetheless, even if the supporting narratives cannot compare in their completeness to the main novella, the deliberate contestation Naipaul makes against the traditional novel form achieves two objectives - firstly, he avoids the danger of the traditional immigrant novel which prizes Home above all others, instead providing a much more bracing, realistic (if pessimistic) view of the post-colonial state as inherently fragile and disturbed; secondly, instead of a simple power dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed, the coloniser and the colonised, he gives us a far more multifaceted look at the nature of displacement, suffered by many characters on many levels, conjoined and in conversation through the various levels of narratives.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the main novella, and yet while I appreciated the concept of supporting narratives and a multitude of narratives, I did think that they weakened the overall enjoyability of the book.
rocomama's review against another edition
Some good insights about the experience of migrating to the US, but too much anti-Black racism in this book to finish it. Literally, all the characters have names except for the more-melanated humans. I had to put this book down.
samratbasani's review against another edition
3.0
Not quite sure how I felt about it, but I'm glad to have this percolating.
trevorjameszaple's review against another edition
4.0
Bleak as hell. Title story is one of those trips down a long route where the protagonists slowly come to discover that they're both alien and unwanted in a place where they had become accustomed, like Conrad or Coppola's take on Conrad. The two short stories are somewhat less entrancing, stories of men taken away from their routines of home and forced to try to make a life in a strange country.