From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Enigma of Arrival comes a profound novel of cultural displacement, masterfully evoking a colonial man’s experience in a postcolonial world.
“No one else … seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the very voice of exile.” —The New York Review of Books
Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman. But it is the return home and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governed nation that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.
“A Tolstoyan spirit.... The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.” —John Updike, The New Yorker
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Enigma of Arrival comes a profound novel of cultural displacement, masterfully evoking a colonial man’s experience in a postcolonial world.
“No one else … seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the very voice of exile.” —The New York Review of Books
Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman. But it is the return home and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governed nation that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.
Praise
“A Tolstoyan spirit.... The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.” —John Updike, The New Yorker
