The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a Dickensian novel that traces
the unlikely career of a failed schoolteacher and village masseur who
becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved
politician in Trinidad.
"No one else ... seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the
very voice of exile." --The New York Review of Books
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel--his first--V. S.
Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh
Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the
1940s masseurs were the island's medical practitioners of choice. As one
character observes, "I know the sort of doctors they have in Trinidad.
They think nothing of killing two, three people before breakfast."
Ganesh's journey is variously aided and impeded by a Dickensian cast of
rogues and eccentrics. There's his skeptical wife, Leela, whose
schooling has made her excessively, fond. of; punctuation: marks!; and
Leela's father, Ramlogan, a man of startling mood changes and an
ever-ready cutlass. There's the aunt known as The Great Belcher. There
are patients pursued by malign clouds or afflicted with an amorous
fascination with bicycles. Witty, tender, filled with the sights,
sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic
Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
