The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

Overview

A profound novel of cultural displacement, The Mimic Men masterfully evokes a colonial man’s experience in a postcolonial world.

Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman. But it is the return home and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governed nation that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307776563
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/20/2010
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

V.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.
 
His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.
 
In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Wiltshire, England

Date of Birth:

August 17, 1932

Place of Birth:

Chaguanas, Trinidad

Education:

Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, 1943-48; B.A., University College, Oxford, 1953

What People are Saying About This

Paul Theroux

The novel's pattern is amazingly balanced...It is dense and complex, but it resembles less a sold chunk of a man's history than an elaborate circling syllogry of memory, crossing and recrossing.

Editorial Reviews

"He is the most compelling master of social truth that I know of in the contemporary novel." -- The New York Times Book Review

Alfred Kazin

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

“Ambitious and successful.” —The Times (London)

From the Publisher