http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/200... ( )

Basic Reason for Beginning: We had to read One Out of Many for class, and I quite enjoyed that, despite the first person (or perhaps and amazingly because of it), so I wanted to read the whole thing.
Basic Reason for Finishing: *stubborn*

Full review here. ( )

In a Free State is a collection of short stories -- one more of a novella -- about expatriates living outside their home country. Naipaul has a good vantage point, being somewhat of a "wanderer" himself: of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and living most of his life in England. He is well positioned to lay bare the perceived glamour of far-off lands. However, this book did nothing for me. Nothing, nada, zilch. The characters were largely unlikeable. They were mostly male, and his female characters were appallingly shallow. And then I found it impossible to get past Naipaul's misogynist history, having psychologically abused his wife for many, many years. It's disappointing to read a Booker prize-winner, from a Nobel prizewinning author, and have it fall so flat.

This may be my shortest review ever, but there's really nothing more I have to say. ( )

Fiction & Literature
-Fiction, individuals confronted with alien cultures. Nobel Price winner.

In a Free State
V.S. Naipaul
Penguin 1973
A book review by Danny Yee - © 1994 http://dannyreviews.com/
In a Free State is a sequence of five works — two short stories (the prologue and the epilogue), two forty page novellas and a one hundred and forty page short novel — linked by a common theme. All are about individuals stranded in foreign countries and confronted by alien cultures. In "One out of Many" an Indian servant is almost accidentally transported to Washington, where he finds a niche for himself but remains profoundly alienated from the world around him. "Tell Me Who to Kill" is the tragic story of a West Indian who moves to London. The novel "In a Free State" is about expatriate English civil servants in a recently independent African state torn by civil war. And the epilogue and prologue present the more detached view of an experienced traveller writing in his journal.
In a Free State is one of the best works of fiction I have read that deals with the subject of cultural incommensurability and the broken symmetry of colonial relationships. Naipaul's use of multiple stories helps him present a more balanced perspective than a straightforward novel would have allowed, the subject is one he has made his own, and his prose is up to its usual high standard. There can have been little surprise when In a Free State won the 1971 Booker Prize.

25 March 1994