In a Free State
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In a Free State
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Narrated by:
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Vikas Adam
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Neil Shah
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Simon Vance
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By:
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V. S. Naipaul
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.What listeners say about In a Free State
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 31-01-2021
In a free State
Thought provoking, well written , well read stories.Want to read more of this author's books. Highly ecommend this book.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Sister Luke
- 28-08-2023
State of Fear
I found the second story very hard to follow, especially in audio form. Was he is in love with his younger brother or what? Was he having wet dreams about <i>him</i>? He was always referring to his prettiness. And was Frank his friend or his lover? I really don't understand what was happening, when, of what the point of it all was. Audiobooks are much harder to follow than proper books, but I can't be bothered actually downloading an ebook to read. It wasn't that interesting.
Overall, strange book. The writing was good, but the book (which I had thought was a single novel set in Africa. I did not expect the first two stories, or the ambiguous, plotless framing narratives) did not exactly meet my expectations. Though if it failed to satisfy them, it did not exactly disappoint them either. For one thing, the review or whatever it was which prompted me to add this to my TBR, a long time ago, gave me the impression this was set in Rhodesia or South Africa or some such place, and the main characters were possibly a married couple or a group of young White (possibly American) tourists or missionaries or something like that, and the story contrasted their superficially humanitarian and egalitarian, but in fact fundamentally condescending and dysfunctional these visiting Whites had with the black African natives with the apparently harsher but in a deeper sense more genuinely affectionate relationship they had with the Boer settlers who had been living among them for centuries. It's funny how one sort of constructs in one's mind a version of a book one has meant to read for a long time, which one had only heard bits and pieces about, and how this imagined book matches or doesn't match the real book when one finally gets around to reading it.
This book is of the kind of literary fiction which requires a great deal of rumination before one knows exactly what to make of it. The preoccupation of all three stories (the third and titular one being much longer than the first two) seems to be race relations in Naipul's time, in particular between the trifecta of Whites, blacks and (South) Asians. The first two stories have Indian protagonist-narrators (one Indian from India, who goes to America, the other Indian presumably from somewhere in the Carribbean, who goes to Britain). The last has a white protagonist-narrator who lives in an unnamed African country. These three stories are bookended by two apparently nonfictional, probably autofictional Mediterranean multiracial travel snapshots with broader geopolitical and civilizational implications, but no plots to speak of.
These stories--which aren't really 'stories' as much as larger or smaller slices of the main characters' lives--are well-written but I wouldn't say I enjoyed any of them. They're too bleak for that. Naipul is equally critical of both colonialism and post-colonialism; black, White, brown: all cop their fair share of both understanding and blame, empathy and satire. He is interested above all in the painful complexities and contradictions that fester where races, where continents, where worlds collide. His writing if it is 'against' anything, is in opposition to the moralistic reductiveness which today is the only acceptable key in which (European) imperialism--which was never solely black and white, racially or morally--may be presented. This even-handedness has today earned him the reputation of a 'right-wing reactionary', from which even his brown skin and impressively exotic name cannot absolve him. But I think, above all, he was honest, writing the truth as he saw it through his rather grim lenses, sparing no one, not even his own kind. And for that he deserves respect.
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