Gil Hates Everything

“In A Free State” by V. S. Naipaul

Once again, not my kind of book. This is a long novella, two short stories, and a framing sequence, about the state of being in another country, and slowly letting go of your obligations to where you came from – being in a ‘free’ state, you see. And also, it takes on what makes a state free.

And it’s really boring. Well, the two short stories are quite good; in one, an Indian servant comes with the Ambassador to New York and then breaks away to live his own life, and in the other, feuding cousins in the West Indies manage to fuck each other up quite awfully. So those are good. The long story, though? God knows what the point of that was. A man (who’s gay; I should remember this was a big deal in literature in 1971) and a woman are escaping some increasingly hazardous African country, bickering throughout their encounters with the local colour, so to speak. I didn’t find it compelling at any point. I mean, I’m not a natural lover of road trips in books, but they can surely be better than this.

I’ll give this one half a point for the short stories (the framing sequence is rubbish too), so we’re looking at a score of 1.5/4 so far. Hmph.