Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

A former hero of the South African resistance and his English mistress arrrive on a troubled Caribbean island, where their involvement with a young mulatto revolutionary leader leads to violence

Guerrillas

Marion

She lived in the midst of change, repetitive and sterile; it did not disguise the fact of the greater impermanence. But she was privileged: she told herself that once a day. Security was the basis of her privilege. Yet she saw, with a satiric eye, the people around her as accumulators, concerned about dead rituals and dead forms, unmindful of the approaching catas trophe. She saw the girls who were her friends as empty vessels, waiting to be filled by men, who in time appeared their name echoing and re-echoing in conversation, Roger and Mark and John, as empty as the girls. But Roger and Mark and John could have been models for the men to whom she had once given herself, and in whom she had seen extraordinary qualities. Out of this contradiction between what she did and said and what she felt, out of this knowledge of her own security and her vision of decay, of a world running down she moved from one crisis to another.

She said, ‘Do you always make love in your Mao-shirt?’

"When everybody wants to fight there's nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.'

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