The Mystic Masseur

The Mystic Masseur PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307776514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a Dickensian novel that traces the unlikely career of a failed schoolteacher and village masseur who becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. “No one else … seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the very voice of exile.” —The New York Review of Books In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character observes, “I know the sort of doctors they have in Trinidad. They think nothing of killing two, three people before breakfast.” Ganesh’s journey is variously aided and impeded by a Dickensian cast of rogues and eccentrics. There’s his skeptical wife, Leela, whose schooling has made her excessively, fond. of; punctuation: marks!; and Leela’s father, Ramlogan, a man of startling mood changes and an ever-ready cutlass. There’s the aunt known as The Great Belcher. There are patients pursued by malign clouds or afflicted with an amorous fascination with bicycles. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad’s dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.

The Mystic Masseur

The Mystic Masseur PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307776514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a Dickensian novel that traces the unlikely career of a failed schoolteacher and village masseur who becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. “No one else … seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the very voice of exile.” —The New York Review of Books In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character observes, “I know the sort of doctors they have in Trinidad. They think nothing of killing two, three people before breakfast.” Ganesh’s journey is variously aided and impeded by a Dickensian cast of rogues and eccentrics. There’s his skeptical wife, Leela, whose schooling has made her excessively, fond. of; punctuation: marks!; and Leela’s father, Ramlogan, a man of startling mood changes and an ever-ready cutlass. There’s the aunt known as The Great Belcher. There are patients pursued by malign clouds or afflicted with an amorous fascination with bicycles. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad’s dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.

Miguel Street

Miguel Street PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370615
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
To the residents of Miguel Street, a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital, their neighbourhood is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There’s Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build “the thing without a name;” Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion; Big Foot, the dreaded bully with glass tear ducts; and the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. Their lives (and the legends their neighbours construct around them) are rendered by V. S. Naipaul with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion in this tender, funny novel.

The Mystic Masseur's Wife

The Mystic Masseur's Wife PDF Author: MAHARAJ
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
ISBN: 9781845235338
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the end of V.S. Naipaul's satire on Hindu life in Trinidad, The Mystic Masseur, the protagonist, Ganesh Ramsumair, caps his rise to fame as a colonial politician, by transforming himself into an English gentleman, G. Ramsay Muir, and heading off to England. In Naipaul's novel, Ganesh's wife, Leela, plays a very secondary, indeed recessive role, though there are occasional clues that she has a clearer grasp of reality than her husband. In the hidden spaces of Naipaul's novel, J. Vijay Maharaj creates a quite different kind of story for Leela, who decides that when her husband abandons Trinidad for England, she is too much attached to her life on the island to follow him. All this is relayed to the author by Leela in her later years, in a series of tape-recordings, which form the basis for the novel. This is much more than a necessary rewriting of the male-centredness of VS Naipaul's perspective, though Maharaj creates an inventive and often richly humorous counter-narrative within that novel's plotlines, as well as a dynamic afterlife for Leela after Naipaul's novel ends. Maharaj creates for Leela an utterly convincing and compelling voice -- earthy, shrewd and in love with life.

The Suffrage of Elvira

The Suffrage of Elvira PDF Author: Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Publisher: Harmondsworth : Penguin
ISBN:
Category : Caribbean fiction (English)
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, an old, comically timid and absent-minded man, Surujpat Harbans, runs for office, aided by superstition, bribes, and an aggressive compaign.

A Bend in the River

A Bend in the River PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0735277141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Guerrillas

Guerrillas PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307789314
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a novel of exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. “A brilliant novel in every way.… [It] shimmers with artistic certainty.” —The New York Times Book Review Set on a troubled Carribbean island, where “everybody wants to fight his own little war,” where “everyone is a guerrilla,” the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island – subdued now, almost withdrawn – to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed – excited – by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives.

The Enigma of Arrival

The Enigma of Arrival PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times

The Mystic Masseur

The Mystic Masseur PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370550
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first of Naipaul’s twelve novels tells of the meteoric rise and hilarious metamorphosis of Ganesh Ramsumair from failed primary schoolteacher and struggling masseur to author, revered mystic, peerless politician and the most popular man in Trinidad.

Half a Life

Half a Life PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370593
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Finding the Center

Finding the Center PDF Author: Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description