In a Free State - V. S. Naipaul torrent

Category: Literature
Language: EnglishKeywords: 1960's Africa booker prize Egypt England India Multiple POVs Novella Postcolonial Short Story Collection Washington DC West Indies
Written by V. S. Naipaul
Read by Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged
No writer has rendered our boundary-less, 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.
May 8 2018
9 hrs and 4 mins
(This seemed appropriate after posting Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The summary describes the title story, whereas “One out of Many” is a story about an Indian man suffering culture shock when entering the United States during the height of 1960s counterculture, and “Tell Me Who to Kill” is a memory tale of an elder man who emigrated to London in support of his brother.)


No writer has rendered our boundary-less, 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.

May 8 2018
9 hrs and 4 mins

(This seemed appropriate after posting Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The summary describes the title story, whereas “One out of Many” is a story about an Indian man suffering culture shock when entering the United States during the height of 1960s counterculture, and “Tell Me Who to Kill” is a memory tale of an elder man who emigrated to London in support of his brother.)