Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Mystic Masseur

The Mystic Masseur

Naipaul, V. S.

Paperback

Series: Vintage International

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 037570714X
ISBN13: 9780375707148
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: Jan 8 2002
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.52 Width: 5.12 Depth: 8.06
Language: English
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.

Also from

Naipaul, V. S.

View All

Also in

Literary Fiction

View All