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Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
My desert island book Some books you read, and the images they create stay with you for a very long time. I first read this book years ago and it certainly had that effect on me, and I can vividly recollect the three very different worlds the book describes in its short stories that come together to create an overwhelming and bleak view of what it is to be an immigrant, whether that's as a white man in Africa, or an Asian in the West. The subtlety and power of the writing blows into the weeds the stack of recent 'immigrant'... more info
Engaging but bleak This won the Booker in the early 1970s, but I would say that its status as a novel is questionable. 'In a Free State' consists of a central narrative about two people on a desperate road trip through an African country in the throes of revolution, framed by short story fragments on the same theme - displacement - at the beginning and the end.
The overall effect on the reader of this collection of stories concerning people struggling to feel at home in foreign lands is powerful, and the prose is elegant... more info
In A Free State? In a Free State is one of the great cultural fiction books of the last century, combining fictious characters in real life cultures. The supporting narratives along with the main novel make an excellent thought-provoking read about the differences in culture across the globe, the changes that may seem so subtle for an outsider escalated to great fears by the characters living in those situations.
The first narrative is a brief account of an Indian servant, Santosh, who travels from Bombay to Washington,... more info
Five sketches of freedom, alienation and culture shock The five stories that make up IAFS travel from international waters, America, India, Britain, The West Indies, unnamed Africa to Egypt. If Naipaul’s scope of geography is great then his sense of linking different people in different places together is even greater. Even though the book is made up from different stories that bear no relation to each other they all have a link in their main characters seeing another country and culture as a stranger as they travel from home. The travel log of a traveller... more info
