In a Free State

I was reading Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Confessions of a Xenophile’ the other day, and could see him equally confessing about his admiration towards the Noble Laureate V.S. Naipaul and his works. I felt like reading at least one of Naipaul's works. The office library had his booker winner of 1971, ‘In a Free State’. A Political, Socio-Economical (Existentialism? I’m no critic. I can’t say. But definitely looks like one) work of serious fiction, which talks thru narrating the woes of immigrants who lose themselves, or searching themselves in vein in another part of the world where they don’t belong to. It consists of three different novellas of similar theme with a prologue and epilogue. One of these characters is not exactly in a search of a fortune but rather for freedom, and naturally he has nothing much to grieve about what he leaves behind. But when he eventually gets dwelled into the new world without much of a massive effort, he still falls into a philosophically meaningless existence. (One out of Many). In another tale, the man sacrifices his own happiness for the selfless indianite protector feeling (which would not quite work in the foreign atmosphere) towards his irresponsible sibling, and gradually leads himself to astray(Tell me whom to Kill). The third tale talks about a man who loses himself in another continent, being thrown into the world of ethnic struggles and getting involved a bit too much into the violent after-effects of a forced power transition, in a self driven fashion towards devastation(In a Free State). These tales don’t talk about any special immigrant. It’s about all type of immigrants and their woes. It could be an Indian in a white’s world, or a white in a black’s world. I felt Naipaul uses strong narrations with a flavor of Black humor and dry sarcasm. But one thing is for sure; that once you start reading it, you can hardly put it down. Especially the first two tales will assure you the simplicity and readability and It gets so complicated and so dry but yet readable when you reach into the main story ‘In a Free Sate’. You get confused why it’s called a novel as it’s a collection of stories where the individual characters never meet each other. But when you observe it as a whole, it makes complete sense. It’s a single story. It’s a story of people, who don’t require a name or about the people whose name don’t make any difference.
This is how the story ‘One Out of Many’ ends;
“I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that of my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.”