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In a Free State

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About this listen

No writer has rendered our boundaryless, postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.

On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home.

By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In a Free State is Naipaul at his best.

©2011 V. S. Naipaul (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories World Literature Africa Funny
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This is a wonderful book. It is really a novella plus a set of shorter stories, each of which deals with some aspect of immigration or expatriate life. The novella is set in post-colonial Africa and describes a car journey taken by two Brits from the capital city back to their compound in the African countryside. Their privileged lives and their sarcastic, racist, arrogant attitudes towards African people (the word savages is,shockingly, used) are portrayed in wonderful prose.

The story is shocking in its content and language; some of this is due to the fact that it was written in1971 when attitudes were different. But the novel is as relevant today as it was back then; the world has not moved on, in some respects.

The other stories concern immigration, the dislocation that can be experienced when living in a different culture and the kind of rampant bullying and discrimination that immigrants can experience.

Overall, a thought-provoking book that has made me think hard about a lot of things.

Masterful storytelling

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3 stories bounded by a framing narrative are woven into a Booker Prize winner. Naipaul has an astonishing ability to provide authentic voices for characters ranging from Indian servants to English post-colonial administrators. The title hints at a central theme of "freedom" and the insecurity and unpredictability that comes with it, but it also occurs to me that it hints a mere hiatus in a succession of empires. The introduction begins in Greece, the first story moves from India to the USA, the second from India to Britain, the third is Africa and the finale in Egypt - where Chinese tourists hint at a new rising power.

Voices of the Past

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struggled to tie the beginning to the middle to the end. didn't like it.

nonsense

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