Product Description

Set on a troubled Caribbean island - where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria - Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions.

Together with a leader of the "revolution", they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence. Guerrillas depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private violence. Place and people are evoked with an intensity unrivalled elsewhere. The novel comes with extraordinary force from the centre of a profound moral awareness of the world's plight.

'Impeccable prose, precise, austere, modulating always from place to people to dialogue with a fastidious reserve. Guerrillas seems to me Naipaul's Heart of Darkness: a brilliant artist's anatomy of emptiness, and of despair' Observer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75296 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Review
'Impeccable prose, precise, austere, modulating always from place to people to dialogue with a fastidious reserve. Guerrillas seems to me Naipaul's Heart of Darkness: a brilliant artist's anatomy of emptiness, and of despair' Observer

About the Author
V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including A House for Mr Biswas, The Mystic Masseur and The Enigma of Arrival, and ten books of non-fiction including An Area of Darkness and Among the Believers. He has won the Booker Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the WH Smith award and in 1993 was awarded the first David Cohen British Literature Award. His new novel, Half A Life, was published in September 2001. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Wiltshire.

Customer Reviews

The author's home ground: exile, and post-independence betrayal and decay
Despite his well-documented irascibility and his unique ability to give offence to every community about whom he writes, V S Naipaul remains the finest living exponent of impeccable, clear, deceptively simple English prose. In Guerillas his characteristic disdain for black and white alike (and, despite what his critics say, Indian too, but not here) is again evident, but as ever is fully qualified (and almost justified) by their self-seeking actions and behaviour. Nobody describes better the post-independence decay of ex-colonies better than Naipaul: `The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump: everything here, hillside, forest, sea, mangrove, turned to slum'. However, it is not just physical decay but ideological and moral.
A petty anti-apartheid activist arrives on an unstable and unruly Caribbean island (despite the decoys Trinidad in all but name) where injustice and poverty abound and revolution simmers, though nobody has a coherent post-revolution strategy. Lacking understanding of the country and unsure of what role he will play there, he brings his lover who becomes transfixed by wannabe revolutionary Jimmy Ahmed, a half-black son of a Chinese grocer, who dreams of an agrarian revolution. Their presence stirs up a hornet's nest in a community already racked by suspicion, resentment and paranoia and ultimately ends in tragedy. But it is not really a story about personalities (never Naipaul's strong point); it is about a country still controlled by colonial and foreign interests but too divided, too corrupt and unstructured to bring about change and build a successful new post-independence country.
A fine book, if somewhat dated now, but not the author at his best.