Trinidad and Tobago / All works
Novel · A way to begin
The Mystic Masseur
V. S. Naipaul · 1957
Synopsis
In colonial Trinidad, Ganesh Ramsumair, a schoolteacher with no vocation, returns to his village and dreams of being a writer, or a masseur, at a time when masseurs are not worth much. He marries a shopkeeper's daughter, from whom he extracts a dowry, reads hundreds of books, publishes at his own expense a small treatise on Hinduism, then discovers in himself a gift as a mystic healer. Success comes, and with it money and ambition, in a rise as comic as it is disconcerting.
Context
It is its author's first published book: the publisher André Deutsch, after reading the manuscript of a book of stories about a street in Port of Spain, had asked him to write a novel first. The book was awarded a prize the following year, and was followed by other comic novels about Trinidad, up to the great family chronicle of 1961. Ismail Merchant brought it to the screen in 2001, from a screenplay by Caryl Phillips.
Who it is for
Short, funny, constantly ironic: a good way into a body of work that is otherwise much darker.
Prizes and reception
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958; in 2001 the Nobel Foundation praised the spirit of pure comedy of his early books.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.