This is my third book by Shiva Naipaul, and while his writing remains brilliant, perhaps this doesn't grab the reader as much as his others.
Set in the fictional S American land of Cuyama (presumably Guyana, just across the water from Naipaul's native Trinidad), it's the description of a strange, uncommunicative marriage, against a backdrop of political upheaval. The constitution drawn up by the previous British administrators is now- 21 years after independence- being torn up as the black population begin to demand more power.
But this energy and anger is in stark contrast to the St Pierres- husband Aubrey, educated, well-to-do, devoted to atoning for his slave-owning ancestors by such futile gestures as running a spectacularly unsuccessful bookshop and taking in an impoverished local girl... And his wife, Dina, eaten up with resentment? depression? - "the fragile nature of her presence in his life: a presence that resembled a permanent state of absence."
"The degeneration of a colonial past and the brutality of a decolonized future", reads the blurb, and I can't say more than that. Some lovely writing but not madly gripping. ( )