The Mimic Men by V. S. Naipaul

This is not a spoiler alert per se, since I will not disclose any plot or ending. However, I will not write so much about the book as what it made me feel, think and…write. You are welcome to read my “re-view”, but if you want to know more about the plot, the style…I am afraid this may be of little help

V.S. Naipaul has the magic touch. Writing about (my impression) of The Mimic Men, I think of A Bend in the River and A House for Mr. Biswas. To make amends for my lack of understanding of The Mimic Men, I can say that I am determined to read again…not The Mimics, but one or both of the mentioned masterpieces.
When you read the great work of a fabulous writer, you are bound to raise the stakes and expectations for the next book by the same acclaimed author. If there are two masterpieces, it gets next to impossible to find the same satisfaction in immersing in the third.
That may be what happened here: I did not get hooked by The Mimic Men.
It is a rare phenomenon for me: I can think of three, four authors, from the top of my head that have written more than four or five novels that I loved. They are – Marcel Proust, Somerset Maugham, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. And the books I am referring to are:
In Search of Lost Time – which could be looked at as a whole long novel, or the best story ever told in 6 novels
Somerset Maugham has fascinated me with Of Human Bondage (rated among the best novels of the 20th century) The Painted Veil, Short Stories (practically all of them), Cakes and Ale and The Moon and Six Pence
Herman Hesse is a Nobel Prize Winner and the well known author of Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund (which overwhelmed me and I am in the process of reading again) and The wonderful The Glass Bead Game
Thomas Mann again a Nobel Prize Winner and marvelous writer- I loved first of all The Magic Mountain (included among the best books ever written, together with some other of Thomas Mann’s works), Death in Venice, The Buddenbrooks and Joseph and His Brothers.
Thomas Mann has a short story, apart from the novels mentioned, which had a tremendous impact on me. I am afraid I do not know the name of the tale and it may be rather irrelevant, for it is one message in it which “pierced my heart” not the whole story, since I do not recollect much of the rest…
One character in the short story says something like this:
“I look around and I am amazed- I hear people complaining all the time:
“- I love you so much, I have no words to express it
Another one says
-Our friendship means so much, words are too small”
….

The character says:

- Words like love and friendship mean so much that we do not find them in real life
- Only in books you find love and friends
- Love is a feeling, in its definition, that goes way beyond what people around feel
The same with friendship
A friend will stay with us, help us foe ever…
But not in real life

If we look at the multitude of facebook friendships which mean next to nothing, he is right and accurate for our times.

I wrote more about a Thomas Mann than about The Mimic Men…but I did warn you, didn’t I??
Included here would be one of those smileys, but I have read that Martin Seligman feels they are useless and I agree, they are so much used and abused that they have ceased to mean anything…like so many of those big words: patriotism, I care for you….

The Mimic Men marks a middle point of sorts in the works of V.S. Naipaul. It straddles his earlier novels about life in multicultural Trinidad - books he came to consider little trinkets that, in their charming exoticism, did no more than amuse the Westerner ("A House for Mr. Biswas," "The Mystic Masseur," "Miguel Street," etc.) and the later jaded novels of post-colonial disillusion, notably "A Bend in the River" and "In a Free State." Here, for maybe the first time in his fiction, we see Naipaul world-weary and suspicious of everyone. "An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India," with some notoriety, had already expressed this hostile attitude in Naipaul's nonfiction.

Naipaul resents the foolishness of the post-colonial situation. Having made independence his only goal, the formerly colonized leader has no idea what to do with it. Because his independence was premised on the rejection of his colonizer, he finds it a tall order now to administer the institutions of that colonizer: those government payrolls, industry, and machinery, those agricultural cooperatives and labour unions; the vast general bureaucracy of modernity. And so the post-colonial politician performs the same function he had during colonialism even as his country's institutions waste away: he is not so much a leader as a representative of primitive men, narrowly educated but now imbued with a sense of agency. He cannot lead them; they lead him. His job as first among equals is to drive them into a frenzy - a task they demand of him because that's all that, according to Naipaul, the comic-book politics of postcolonial society consists of. The entire situation is untenable. The model for Browne, the major politician in this book, is almost certainly Eric Williams, Trinidad's first post-independence prime minister.

And amid this situation, others, too, seek to locate themselves. Naipaul finds no charm in them. Take, for example, Sandra, Ralph Singh's white wife, who, with Naipaul’s remarkable prescience, foreshadows Gale Benson - the British daughter of a Tory politician who took with Black Power criminals and would, some years after the Mimic Men was published, be brutally murdered in Trinidad. Naipaul's essay on Benson's killing, "Michael X and The Black Power Killings in Trinidad," is a fantastic exploration of the sort of racial confusion exhibited by the likes of Sandra. Sandra's relocation from being a middle-class white woman in England to the wife of an upper-class colonial elevates her twice: she can look down upon the colonials because of her Englishness and look down upon the other whites because of her new social standing. Or consider Stella, the aristocratic English woman obsessed with children's books, with whom Ralph has a furtive, unsatisfactory sexual encounter before she subtly reminds him that he's no more than a curiosity to her (and before they both quietly realize that they have nothing to offer each other). Or take the Deschampneufs, a patrician Isabella family, so seemingly assured of their highbrow status that they are the only ones, in this island of pretenders and wannabes, capable of mixing with the lowly without fear of being tainted by such interactions. Young Deschampneuf is so self-assured, so comfortable in his history with all its complicatedness that, even while showing fondness, he's able to say of a black classmate, "He wouldn't fetch five dollars". Yet all this posturing does is make clear the Deschampneufs' anxieties about racial purity. They have their family lore refined - including a beautiful ancestor who used to fuck Stendhal, but what quickly because evident is that all their behaviour, all the emphasis on history, can be explained by one fact: they recognize that their place in history has changed, and that all they can try to salvage is the purity of what they have been before. Modernity has few gifts for the well-born.

But most of all, consider Ralph himself. He's been driven out of his "makeshift society," the terrible morass of postcolonial drudgery, into Englishness. But here, he realizes that he'll always remain a barefoot colonial to these people with whom he's cast his whole lot. Ralph Singh will always remain Ranjit Kripalsingh, just like Nikki Haley will always remain Nimrata Randhawa (a theme Naipaul explores in his essay, “Jamshed into Jimmy”). Ralph feels that he deserves to have come from something better, a people with a greater sense of history (for this reason, he claims his mother's wealthy family but not his father's). And this sense of superiority is directed at his entire country - a dot on the map, not real players in the game of worldmaking, an island of illiterates. But the superiority is tempered by rejection: the people with whom he feels the strongest affinity, white people, remind him that he is not their own. His mimicry was for nothing. Ralph Singh and Ranjit Kripalsingh mean the same thing to them. He's become an alienated country of his own, despising where he's from and despised where he is - the enigma of arrival.

There must be a corner in V.S. Naipaul's heart living loneliness.

Naipaul never really resided somewhere, he was always on the way to seek a way to be free.

This book is about memory, love, friendship and childhood but actually nothing, it brings me plenty of emptiness after reading.

I miss Naipaul.

An interesting, engaging, well written novel in the first person about Ralph Singh, a man of Indian origin, growing up on the fictional island British colonial country of Isabella in the Caribbean. His birth name is Ranjit Kripalsingh. At an early age in school, he called himself Ralph Singh. Ralph emigrates to England and marries a white English woman named Sandra. He writes about his experiences living with other poor immigrants in Kensington, London. Later he returns to Isabella with his wife, Sandra. Back in Isabella Ralph becomes a property developer and politician who tries to represent his people against British colonial rule.

I found this novel to be a very satisfying reading experience. Whilst not quite as good as his novels, ‘A House for Mr Biswas’, ‘A Bend in the River’, ‘Miguel Street’, and ‘In a Free State’, ‘The Mimic Men’ is a very well written novel.

V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

This book was first published in 1967.

Naipaul's prose is always precise, provocative, even from time to time tender, and this early book is no exception. His penetration into human nature and the human condition here reveals that he could be both a humanitarian and misanthropic. He writes, autobiographically, at a time when the two were more in balance and those sparks of deep humanity are welcomed. While his insights into our motivations and behaviour are searingly perceptive, I foung The Mimic Men (of whom his main character, Ralph Singh, is one, not going through life with a free will to just be, but with the need to prove and improve himself for the sake of both native and colonial society) overly analytical.

I know that return to my island and to my political life is impossible. The pace of colonial events is quick, the turnover of leaders rapid. I have already been forgotten; and I know that the people who supplanted me are themselves about to be supplanted. My career is by no means unusual. It falls into the pattern. The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost. Politics for us are a do-or-die, once-for-all charge. Once we are committed we fight more than political battles; we often fight quite literally for our lives. Our transitional or makeshift societies do not cushion us. There are no universities or City houses to refresh us and absorb us after the heat of battle. For those who lose, and nearly everyone in the end loses, there is only one course: flight. Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness: London and the home counties.

The bitter life of Ralph Singh, a politician in a Caribbean island. His childhood. His loves. His political career and his final years in a sort of exile. Naipaul writes about people who have been fucked over by colonialism. But instead of taking grievance with the oppressor, Naipaul focuses on the impotence and cruelty of the oppressed.

It is very painful to read Naipaul's books because he writes about a type of colonial who is always in flight and can never find peace or belong with his own people:

I feared drama. My dream of the cocoa estate was not the dream of eviction; and it was more than a dream of order. It was a yearning, from the peak of power, for withdrawal; it was a wistful desire to undo. Scarcely the politician’s drive. But then I never was a politician. I never had the frenzy, the sense of mission, the necessary hurt.

I struggled to keep drama alive, for its replacement was despair: the vision of a boy walking on an endless desolate beach, between vegetation living, rotting, collapsed, and a mindless, living sea. No calm then: that came later, fleetingly. Drama failing, I knew frenzy. Frenzy kept me silent. And silence committed me to pretence.

I believe there is a bit of Ralph Singh in most colonials to this very day. While former colonies like India have now gained some power in the world, I still cannot help but feel that we are minor players in the great game, with much of our importance drummed up by the cacophonic local medias.

Excellent prose, but by page 40 I was still awaiting for the arrival of what was promising to be the story of a man's political career on a Caribbean island; meanwhile the narrator was someone neither pleasant nor interesting to be around. This reader moved on.

"Sentence for sentence, he is a model of literary tact and precision…" – for me that is why one should read this book. There is not a line that does not feel considered. This is precisely what Naipaul intended to say. It might not be what a lot of people want to hear but I would respectfully suggest that it is far from irrelevant. A lot of dull (and, indeed, unsympathetic) characters have had a lot to say, Camus' Meursault, in his prison cell (The Outsider), and Saul Bellow's Joseph, in his cheap New York boarding house (Dangling Man), jump to mind but no doubt there are others.

You can read a full review on my blog here.

Dear Mr. Naipaul,
I am truly sorry I didn't like this book. It started well, even if the world in it was weird and seemed without any core. Somewhere close to the middle, it started to peak like a furious tall wave. Then, the wave never crashes, so it can start all over again. In the end politics came in force. And I hate anything related to politics. I am not interested in politicians "sufferings", or hurdles, or inner conflicts. At all.

"...desi era trecut de unu noaptea, noi inca ne plimbam, dupa nenumarate ceaiuri fierbinti. Asta desi emotia, una pe care nu o mai incercasem pana atunci, ar fi fost suficienta sa-mi dea energie.
Pe acele strazi pustii...pe acele strazi parasite mi s-a facut o declaratie care m-a miscat, desi am incercat sa-i rezist. Beatrice hotarase ca ii eram cel mai bun prieten.
Mi-a explicat semnificatia cuvantului, si mi-era teama ca astepta o invitatie in camaruta mea in forma de carte.
Dar nu; ne-am plimbat inainte si inapoi in jurul locuintei ei...iar cand in cele din urma, ne-am oprit in fata casei ei si a venit momentul sa ne despartim, am constatat ca nu astepta nimic de la mine...."

Having read and very much been inspired by Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, I had high hopes for this classic. However it was not quite what I had anticipated. The first half was a compelling read. It bogged down in the middle but picked up a little toward the end.

I found this a bit of a challenge to get through. Yet quite the glimpse into a world I can only hope never to witness. I particularly enjoyed the sections of self reflection.