Name: In a Free State
Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9781529014051

V. S. NAIPAUL

With an introduction by editor and author Robert McCrum. Winner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018. A young Indian servant in Washington. An Asian West Indian in London. Both are far from home and both are desperately trying to build a new life in a deeply unfamiliar world. In between them lies the landscape of an unnamed country, a brutal place reminiscent of Idi Amin's Uganda. This central story is about those who once thought of Africa as liberating, but now find themselves in an increasingly harsher reality. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1971, In a Free State is one of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's many towering literary achievements. It is a story of the desperation and heartbreak we find in those who are displaced and who try, often in vain, to make a home in their new surroundings. Frightening, disquieting and merciless, this is one of Sir Naipaul's greatest novels: fraught but full of pity.

In a Free State

Marion

Africa here was decor. Glamour for the white visitor and expatriate; glamour too for the African, the man flushed out from the bush, to whom, in the city, with independence, civilization appeared to have been granted complete. It was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it was far from home.

V. S. Naipaul

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a riveting tour de force that examines emigration, dislocation, and dread. “The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.” —The New York Times Book Review No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.

A Novel

I thoroughly enjoyed this though you have to a thick skin for the Condradian (Heart of Darkness) writing. The form of the book itself is quite remarkable. There’s two things that particularly intruigued me about this book: first that the main title story is set in Uganda where i am from— this i believe is the second of Naipaul’s book set in Uganda the other being A Bend In the River. Naipaul spent a couple of months at Makerere University in uganda which used to be the intellectual hub of East Africa. This book, Ngugi’s plays that were first staged at Makerere, Paul Theroux phenomenal essay on liberal white expats in East Africa(

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2935389.pdf

) published in the remarkable Ugandan magazine Transition in the 70s are a reminder of all that’s been lost to structural adjustment policies that destroyed our universities.

Second is i am really fascinated by Naipaul’s writing on post colonial African states. The way he inhibits the characters of the white expats in Uganda leaves a really sour taste in the mouth. I’ve recently become obsessed with a psychoanalysis publication that published a remarkable essay recently on the state of Indian diaspora particularly those leading right wing movements in the west. In this essay( 

https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/nikki-priti-vivek-and-rishi 

psychological mechanisms at work in creating these postcolonial subjects bent on cruelty and barbaric in their embodiment of colonial logics at the expense of human dignity” 

I bring this perhaps to consider what we can make of Naipaul’s antiblackness while being a person of color in addition to being from a British colony himself. Reading this book left me much to consider about the subjectivity of us born in colonies or former colonies, Naipaul was successful and extremely talented and it’s not wrong to call him a successor of Joesph Condrad. (derogatory)

Docking one star for various scenes describing Africans as forest people lol

I thoroughly enjoyed this though you have to a thick skin for the Condradian (Heart of Darkness) writing. The form of the book itself is quite remarkable. There’s two things that particularly intruigued me about this book: first that the main title story is set in Uganda where i am from— this i believe is the second of Naipaul’s book set in Uganda the other being A Bend In the River. Naipaul spent a couple of months at Makerere University in uganda which used to be the intellectual hub of East Africa. This book, Ngugi’s plays that were first staged at Makerere, Paul Theroux phenomenal essay on liberal white expats in East Africa(https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2935389.pdf) published in the remarkable Ugandan magazine Transition in the 70s are a reminder of all that’s been lost to structural adjustment policies that destroyed our universities.

Second is i am really fascinated by Naipaul’s writing on post colonial African states. The way he inhibits the characters of the white expats in Uganda leaves a really sour taste in the mouth. I’ve recently become obsessed with a psychoanalysis publication that published a remarkable essay recently on the state of Indian diaspora particularly those leading right wing movements in the west. In this essay( https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/nikki-priti-vivek-and-rishi ) the writer observes the “psychological mechanisms at work in creating these postcolonial subjects bent on cruelty and barbaric in their embodiment of colonial logics at the expense of human dignity” I bring this perhaps to consider what we can make of Naipaul’s antiblackness while being a person of color in addition to being from a British colony himself. Reading this book left me much to consider about the subjectivity of us born in colonies or former colonies, Naipaul was successful and extremely talented and it’s not wrong to call him a successor of Joesph Condrad. (derogatory)

Docking one star for various scenes describing Africans as forest people lol

The central novel from V.S. Naipaul's Booker Prize-winning narrative of displacement, published for the first time in a stand-alone edition In a Free State: The Novel is set in Africa, in a place like Uganda or Rwanda, and its two main characters are English. They had once found liberation in Africa. But now Africa is going sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make a long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive - the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage - we know everything about the English characters, the African country, and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it. This is one of V. S. Naipaul's greatest novels, hard but full of pity. It won the Booker Prize, in its original edition, in 1971.

The Novel

Shreyaa

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people--Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife” [117]-- are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital [111]. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. [111-12, 120, 130-1, 150, 178, 220-40] And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing,In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.

In a Free State

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