Шива Найпол – лучшие книги

Shiva Naipaul was the brother of V. S. Naipaul and author of Firefles and The Chip-Chip Gatherers. The Chip-Chip Gatherers, his second novel, was winner of the Whitbread Literary Award in 1973 and is set in Naipaul's native Trinidad. It includes a new foreword by Amit Chaudhuri.

The crowded, ramshackle community of the Settlement in Trinidad is at the mercy of a tyrant. Egbert Ramsaran, the proud owner of the Ramsaran Transport Company, who has become the richest man in town through sheer strength of will, is a capricious, eccentric despot who loves nobody and whom nobody can afford to ignore. There is his son Wilbert, bullied into passivity and failure; Vishnu the downtrodden grocer without grace or hope; the beautiful, unpredictable Sushila, who tries to wield her seductive powers over Ramsaran; and her daughter, Sita, intelligent enough to know that escape is possible. Their intricately woven lives are perfectly captured in all their pathos, comedy and humanity.

In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what “liberation,” “revolution” and “socialism” meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

The Khojas are an important Indian family in Trinidad. At their head is Mr Khoja, piously enshrined by his flock of quarrelsome sisters, and at the bottom of the hierarchy is the girl who becomes Mrs Lutchman, who scrapes a living by running a roadside vegetable stall, the heroine of this novel.