Author: V S Naipaul
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 259
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330487132
Description
Set on a troubled Caribbean island - where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria - Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution.
A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a leader of the 'revolution', they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence.
Guerrillas depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private violence. Place and people are evoked with an intensity unrivalled elsewhere. The novel comes with extraordinary force from the center of a profound moral awareness of the world's plight.
COMMENT:
Impeccable prose, precise, austere, modulating always from place to people to dialogue with a fastidious reserve, Guerrillas seems to me Naipaul's "Hear of Darkness: a brilliant artist's anatomy of emptiness, and of despair.
- Observer
The violence actually is in the tone. If you read the book aloud you will see that it's violent in its rhythm. It wasn't angry. It was just violent.
- V S Naipaul