This was the first VS Naipaul work of fiction I read for a session in our book club, having read some of his brutal opinions via essays on India sometime in the past. Was the only one I managed to secure in time from the library, and didn't realise this may not be a good first read to pick up.

The Mimic Men is the first person account of the life of Ralph Singe, former government minister of the small island nation of Isabella, now living in exile. The story is split into three non-linear sections: the first detailing Ralph's college years in London, and his return to Isabella with his English wife; the second dealing with his youth as a privileged, yet minority "Asiatic" on Isabella; the third covering his rise to power in the newly independent nation.

This is one of his earlier works, written in 1967, but not satirical or funny unlike some of his other works. I am not even sure if it is fully fiction or semi autobiographical. Reading reviews of some of his other works and listening to others in my literary group expound on Naipaul, I did feel this book has representation of all that he is famous for, including:

Isolation – all men are islands
Apathy - Depiction of self as a strangely reticent but ambivalent person, not even motivated to anger
Identity – Indian born in a fictional place called Isabella in Caribbean, moved to London and then moved back – handles the complex cultural connotations and mixups very well

Apart from the above, Naipaul's language is incisive and trenchant: other reviewers have called it "exquisite but technical" - I agree with this. People in my lit group likened him to RK Narayan "without the warmth". One aspect I felt was a bit different in this book was the blame he seems to take for his marriage unravelling - seems to be quite fairly assessed unlike his other books (I am told - where he is self absorbed and self indulgent about his own foibles).

After reading this book, I realised that I am not able to hold interest in a book solely for its language alone (which is brilliant in this case) - I need a plot or characters that I either like or understand or at least feel strongly about - none of these emotions were forthcoming when I read this book unfortunately.

Will I read another Naipaul - yes, maybe at some point in the future - the whole clash of cultures and his assessment of it is fascinating enough to want to read more.

Left midway. Did not finish.
Too tedious, slow and cumbersome for my taste. I hardly leave any work midway but just could not finish this.

A mix of something or other. Interesting writing style, seemingly readable, but utterly forgettable from one page to the next. A steam of consciousness to rival Ulysses and almost as much magical realism and analogies to give Satanic Verses a run for its money.
So basically a mess.

It's really good, albeit the eyebrow raising political perspectives. I just read other books that discussed this subject better.

It seemedto have a slow start but as the book progressed the layers were revealed. Very clever, very haunting, and also rather sad.

The ramp up of Part 1 seems unusually long, though hardly a slog. In it Naipaul’s classic, young, post-colonial island man takes up residence in a shared house in post-war Kensington, a part of London that was once seedy and cheap according to the author. The house is full of Maltese and Italians and various sad alcoholics who fall down a lot. Leini, an Italo-Maltese woman living in the dank basement, gets a party together to attend the baptism of her fatherless child. It’s a sad affair.

The narrator, Ranjit Kripalsingh, shortened to Ralph Singh, then marries an emotionally damaged young woman with magnificent breasts who by acting out randomly alienates anyone who might befriend them as a couple. Soon a retreat to the author’s native isle of Isabella seems prudent. On docking, Singh’s mother, learning she now has a white daughter-in-law, makes a scene. Soon thereafter Singh gets creative with a legacy of wasteland and becomes a wealthy developer. The wife gets worse due to the materialism. Soon they’ve gone their separate ways and Singh has begun to write. It’s like The Mystic Masseur but gutted of the humor. The reader, like the writer, dutifully soldiers on.

Part 2 reverts to Singh’s childhood. Suddenly, the book feels more like a Naipaul novel. In it we get the story of his early life on the tropical island of Isabella. His father, an underpaid school teacher, marries into a family a few years before they grow wealthy as the island’s sole Coca-Cola bottler. Formerly seen as a good match, the father is now deprecated by the wife’s family. The now affluent wife comes to believe she’s married beneath herself. The father later becomes a millenarian figure leading disaffected dock workers to a brief idyll in the mountains.

It was not until page 117 that I finally discovered what I’d been missing. It was Naipaul’s frank talk of race. On a school outing, for example, the beautifully Chinese Hok is discovered to be the son of a black mother. As Singh tells us:

We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in a classroom: the name of a shop, the name if a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return.

Hok ignores his black mother in the street. His teacher is appalled. Hok is made to acknowledge her if only by the passing of a few simple words. Suddenly, the boy known in class as Confucius, is persona non grata.

It was for this betrayal into ordinariness that I knew he was crying. It was at this betrayal that the brave among us were tittering. It wasn’t only that the mother was black and of the people, though that was a point; it was because he had been expelled from the private sphere of fantasy [the school] where lay his true life. . . . I felt I had been given an unfair glimpse of another person’s deepest secrets. I felt on that street, shady, with gardens, and really pretty as I now recall it, though then to me wholly drab, that Hok had dreams like mine, was probably also marked, and lived in imagination far from us, far from the island on which he, like my father, like myself, had been shipwrecked. (p.117)

Whoa. From here on the novel begins to fascinate. We’re back in Naipaul Land. And—again—one feels what a privilege it is to read him. Once the narrator moves on to tell the story of his island childhood the old magic ensnares us. I wouldn’t say that Part 1 is inferior, but I was unable to get traction in the story until p. 117.

Part 3 may be brilliant. Time will be helpful in determining that. In it Singh recounts the rise and fall of his political career on Isabella with hardly a dabbling in the substantive issues. The novel becomes not one of scenes and description and dialog—A House for Mr Biswas is the book to go to for that. Here, the novel’s later pages are almost wholly about the actions and opinions of men as they manipulate others’s emotions and reap praise and celebrity. Here, it might be said, the novel becomes all voice, all Singh’s persona, and the concreteness of detail commensurately flattens, dissipates. The world withdraws. A collapse is coming. Singh retreats inward. One has the sense in the end of a lost person, the homunculus peering out of his vessel in desperation, withdrawing, giving up the world.

Extremely cynical, especially about race relations. However his discovering his place in the world, what he wants, and how to interact with others who are struggling is very interesting and makes the reader reflect upon one's own personal life journey. Is happiness the most important goal of life? Ralph isn't so sure.

I know. I know. The character is not the author but the first-person narrator of this fairly early Naipaul novel still aggravated me with his prejudicial assessments of the "Afric," "Aryan" and "Asiatic" races. You also get the feeling he's completely disengaged from his own life, an incidental observer of events, instead of a participant, even when he's at the center of the action -- be it amorous or political, England or the Caribbean.

So far, my least favourite of the Naipaul works I’ve read. In The Mimic Men, we follow the nonlinear narrative of Ralph Singh, as he recounts the circumstances that led to his pursuit of higher education in England, his career in his fictionalised home country of Isabella, and the choices that led to his subsequent divorce and exile. Through the descriptions of his formal British education, his marriage to a white Englishwoman, and his bold “sins of the flesh” — which contributes to his defenestration and exile — he features his own complicity in a system of colonisation, one which allows him only a modicum of power in the formation of Isabella’s new government.

The writing is the typical brilliance of Naipaul’s wording and form of storytelling; however, even though it clarifies the impossibility of those colonised who “mimic” their oppressors to gain power, the story feels slow, the nonlinear approach slightly distracting. It’s beautifully written, with powerful connotations, yet I never became truly engaged with its narrative. Sadly, Ralph Singh is no Mr. Biswas.

3 stars. I recommend this book for those inclined toward examining the complexities of those who take up the challenge of governing under a model formed by a previous colonising power. The Mimic Men clearly highlights the near impossibility of ever escaping the influence of the colonising power. As it if ever could.

Character study of the most self obsessed man who never doubts his own self importance as things come crashing down around him. So not that rare of a person really. Interesting observations of colonial hangover.

I think this is one of the first books I've ever read (at least that I'm consciously aware of) that won a Pulitzer Prize. I can see why it won it. I can also see why popular fiction will never win the Pulitzer.

The novel tells the story of a Caribbean politician and his life "in parenthesis" on his home island and in London. The narrative voice doesn't shift from place to place, which focuses the cohesiveness of the personality that moves between the two spaces. The narrator's depiction of his own life is strangely muted at times, as if he really doesn't ever care what happens to him. He never seems to get angry for instance, even at things he should be angry about, and when people around him express other strong emotions like anger or jealousy, he is terribly uncomfortable with it.

The narrator is fascinated with the quality of light in both places, but most particularly in London, something shared with some other postcolonial writers, and his depictions of landscapes frequently employ light as a descriptor of the mood that each place evokes. It's a very interesting engagement with the physical, yet non-tangible element (light) of landscape.

This is certainly one of those books that sticks with you after you've read it and worthy of a reread at some future point.

Una agradable sorpresa. Lo he devorado. Típico libro de memorias de un señoro, pero oye, qué bien hecho y qué magnético.