Abstract
While Naipaul’s first three books of fiction are extraordinarily popular because of their comedy, implicit are such themes as the way impoverished, hopeless lives and the chaotic mixing of cultures result in fantasy, brutality, violence and corruption. The three books are also social history showing the start of protest politics during the late 1930s and how Trinidad began to change during and after the Second World War. The infusion of American money and the beginnings of local self-government created new possibilities where few existed before; but such social change is treated amusingly, without the analytical perspective found in later novels.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975), 50.
Also see Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman Caribbean Writers Series, 1986; first published 1979), 23.
Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power. The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1968), 100–1. As late as 1961 PNM posters described Eric Williams as Moses II. The use of Messianic rhetoric was earlier associated with Uriah Butler.
George Lamming also regards the West Indian black community as absurdly mimicking the English and as racially sensitive. See Lamming, ‘A Wedding in the Spring’, Commonwealth Short Stories, Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah, eds (London: Edward Arnold, 1971; Macmillan, 1979), 44–56.
Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Toronto Press, 1972), 146–7, 157.
Copyright information
© 2003 Bruce King
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
King, B. (2003). Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira. In: V. S. Naipaul. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3768-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3768-1_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-0456-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-3768-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)