{"id":121748,"date":"2018-02-20T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121748"},"modified":"2018-02-20T15:21:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T20:21:53","slug":"rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Various covers for V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a\u00a0Free State <\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ethics today means not being at home in one\u2019s house. \u2014Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

There appears to have been some contestation in the published form In a\u00a0Free State<\/em> was to assume. Subtitled A Novel with Two Supporting Narratives<\/em>, V. S. Naipaul<\/a>\u2019s 1971 masterpiece features the eponymous novel, two stories which he calls \u201csupporting narratives,\u201d and the bookends of a prologue and an epilogue, taken from his own journal during his travels. It is, therefore, more accurately, a novel with\u00a0four<\/em>\u00a0supporting narratives. I mentioned \u201ccontestation\u201d because Naipaul and his editor at Andre Deutsch, the formidable Diana Athill, amicably disagreed over the final form: it was Athill’s opinion that the (short) novel bearing the title In a\u00a0Free State<\/em>\u00a0should be published as a stand-alone book. Though Naipaul refused the suggestion at the time, he came round to her point of view nearly four decades later, in 2008, when he issued only the novel, shorn of all the \u201csupporting narratives,\u201d with a short introduction explaining his decision. I am of the view that Naipaul\u2019s earlier decision was the correct one: it had resulted in a\u00a0formally\u00a0original and dazzling book, over and above being a remarkable, clear-eyed, truthful and brutal meditation on exile and displacement. Because form seems to have historically been considered\u2014and is still seen as\u2014a white guy\u2019s thing, and because Naipaul never strayed from the realist mode, In a\u00a0Free State<\/em> was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries. It seems too late in the day, especially after historians such as Hayden White, to talk of form and content separately, but there\u2019s no way to think about a disease without naming it first. Contiguity is a form of continuity, too, and brings with it new sets of meaning. Realism has always troubled its practitioners: In what sense does a novel represent the world in a lifelike manner? Surely by artifice? What is real, or realistic, about the extreme selection process that is plot, the progression of a life\u2019s events that make it on to the page? If we could do away with all the elements that are normally considered crucial to coherence in the realist novel, such as plot, character, and continuity, could we still have something that could answer to the name of novel? If all the connective tissue were taken out, could a narrative still cohere through, say, metaphorical underpinnings, or meaning? Could discrete parts make a sum without the simple method of scalar addition?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is Naipaul\u2019s project in In\u00a0a\u00a0Free State.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI was no longer going to manufacture an artificial, contrived story,\u201d he told Radio 3 in 1973. Rereading In a\u00a0Free State<\/em>, I was struck by how its revolutionary nature still remains untarnished; indeed, the experimental side seems magnified at a time when mainstream deployment of the terms avant-garde<\/em>\u00a0and experimental<\/em>, even form<\/em>, seems to have fallen into misuse and downright error. First, there is the theme of displacement, which Naipaul plays on four different instruments: the autobiographical bookends fashioned out of material from his own journals during a cramped steamer journey to Egypt in early 1962; the two first-person narratives, \u201cOne Out of Many,\u201d in the voice of Santosh, an Indian (\u201cIndian Indian,\u201d in Naipaul\u2019s distinction) servant in Washington, and \u201cTell Me Who to Kill,\u201d narrated by a poor and poorly educated Indian Trinidadian in London; and, \u201cIn a\u00a0Free State,\u201d a third-person narrative in which the author\u2019s point of view or presence is barely felt, about a long car journey undertaken by two English people, Bobby and Linda, across an unnamed East African country, most likely Uganda. Naipaul\u2019s own travels in east Africa in 1966 and his subsequent displacement over the years 1966 to 1971, moving from one friend\u2019s home to another, cadging short-term stays in Scotland, London, Canada, the United States, Gloucester, reaching the edge of despair about being able to finish the work, provided material for the novel, as Patrick French details in his astonishing biography, The World Is What It Is<\/em>. Over and above what one calls \u201cmaterial,\u201d there is also the more philosophical question of how an author\u2019s \u201cstate of being\u201d can become the animating soul of the book he is writing. And yet, this osmosis does not occur in a simplistic and pat \u201cI have been struggling with dislocation, so let\u2019s make my characters all peripatetic, too\u201d way. A better way of viewing this would be as a kind of transubstantiation, in which the aspects of lived experience have become assimilated into a kind of vision of life. To be unmoored, to be on the outside of things, is to be in a free state, too. French quotes Naipaul from an interview he gave to his biographer in 2004: \u201cYou will find that many people from far-away countries insist on writing about the far-away country. Their view never amplifies to take in the new experiences that they have actually been living \u2026 People are at their most creative when things are very disturbed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The whole notion of displacement itself is turbulent and fissile here. Who, for example, are the displaced in that brutal yet compassionate epilogue? In it, desert boys come out of the dunes to grab food thrown at them by Italian tourists for their entertainment, and an enraged author intervenes to stop an Egyptian waiter from whipping the boys. The Italians are strangers here, so is the author, but so is the Egyptian waiter, in a more oblique yet more profound way, siding with the amoral Italians against his own, and so, even, are the indigent boys, out of place and chased away in their own home. In the longer narrative, the time of the white colonist classes, to which Bobby and Linda belong, is over; a new postcolonial nation is emerging but its own people are divided among themselves. The coup by the president\u2019s men\u2014supported by the colonial powers\u2014against the king\u2019s men displaces the latter tribe. In the spectacular final section, as Bobby and Linda drive into the fragile safety of the gated compound meant for expats, they watch the villages of the king\u2019s tribespeople in the bush burn and his people rounded up. Some of them are killed, others tied to each other at the neck. Their time is over, too. Naipaul\u2019s radically undeluded vision spares nothing and no one; everyone is displaced by the end. Each of these narratives asks the questions, \u201cWho is free? And what is the nature of his freedom?\u201d and returns extraordinarily complex answers, answers that shift in time, both in rereadings and in the unfolding of history. His abiding theme of what happens to colonized nations after independence, dealt with startling originality and power in The Loss of El Dorado<\/em>, the nonfiction book preceding In a\u00a0Free State<\/em>, continues in the novel. What if nations are broken in such profound ways by the experience of colonialism that freedom can only launch them into a state of replicating the selfsame power structures, similar instruments of oppression of its own peoples?<\/p>\n

When Naipaul wrote the introduction to the 2008 reissue of In a\u00a0Free State<\/em>\u00a0as a stand-alone novel, there was a telling use of faraway: \u201cI had found, in my thirteen or fourteen years as a published writer [he is referring to the year 1971], that my background, and my far-away material, had often been contentious issues for publishers, editors, and reviewers.\u201d\u00a0Plus \u00e7a change <\/em>… Globe-trotting has become a common enough theme in contemporary fiction: short-story collections, linked or otherwise, in which each story is set in a different country; the \u201cinternational\u201d or globalized novel or, what feels like more often, the air-miles novel. Naipaul belonged nowhere\u2014part of this unbelonging was willed, as is evident from his spurning of the place of his birth, Trinidad\u2014and this seems to have given him a kind of radical outsider\u2019s vision that saw through to the very core of peoples, histories, and societies wherever he traveled. James Wood talks of the combination of his conservative vision and his radical eye; the combination is explosive.<\/p>\n

Compare this with the decadence into which the novel of displacement\/exile has fallen. The term has now become exchangeable with the \u201cimmigrant novel,\u201d the general template of which is centered around nostalgia for a notional home which the zero generation, usually parents or grandparents, left behind; the fractures of assimilation; keeping alive the flame of the home\u00a0culture, especially through cooking and music; and, finally, the problematics of the culminating paradise of Westernization as faced by the subsequent generations. This is a terribly insidious trap, amazing only for the way in which generations of immigrant writers have fallen for it, time after time. How did home become this hypostatized notion? One doesn\u2019t have to be a hard-core Althusserian to see what myth of the West this genre perpetuates and to identify the ideological (and, therefore, market) reasons behind the steady, ever-refreshed numbers that sign up to this stereotyping. Of course, great writers will always break the mold of what they\u2019ve been given, or what they\u2019re expected to do: the works of Aleksandar Hemon or Shaun Tan, for example, mint sparklingly new things out of similar themes, subjecting the whole notion of faraway to unique torsion until it yields new meanings. And breaking form was a central part of Naipaul\u2019s artistic endeavor, too: at the beginning of a 2008 essay in The\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, James Wood writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to write serious books,\u201d he said to me, \u201cyou must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. Is it true that Anita Brookner writes exactly the same novel every year?\u201d It is true, I said. \u201cHow awful, how awful.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which brings me back to my earlier point about the formal originality and daring of In a\u00a0Free State<\/em>, letting a sequence of unlinked stories converse with each other and allowing that invisible conversation, rather than anything on the page, to provide a coherence that has deeper, stronger foundations than a conventional, seamlessly plotted realist novel (the reverse definition of an artificial, contrived story).<\/p>\n

I began with Adorno; let me end with him:<\/p>\n

Authors settle into their texts like home-dwellers. Just as one creates disorder by lugging papers, books, pencils and documents from one room to another, so too does one comport oneself with thoughts. They become pieces of furniture, on which one sits down, feeling at ease or annoyed. One strokes them tenderly, scuffs them up, jumbles them up, moves them around, trashes them. To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home. And therein one unavoidably generates, just like the family, all manner of household litter and junk. But one no longer has a shed, and it is not at all easy to separate oneself from cast-offs. So one pushes them to and fro, and in the end runs the risk of filling up the page with them. The necessity to harden oneself against pity for oneself includes the technical necessity, to counter the diminution of intellectual tension with the most extreme watchfulness, and to eliminate anything which forms on the work like a crust or runs on mechanically, which perhaps at an earlier stage produced, like gossip, the warm atmosphere which enabled it to grow, but which now remains fusty and stale. In the end, authors are not even allowed to be home in their writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sixteen years after In a\u00a0Free State<\/em>, Naipaul was to publish yet another form-breaking novel on unbelonging, The Enigma of Arrival<\/em>, powerfully marked by the author\u2019s own melancholy sense of rootlessness. This abiding sense of homelessness, of never arriving, of never reaching the false comfort of assimilation, of never wanting<\/em> to assimilate, and even going so far as making assimilation a nonissue\u2014why are these not noble aims for the novel? In other words, I\u2019m envisaging a novel which sees outsiderness as enabling, a form that has at its center the question, \u201cWhat is our place in the world?\u201d\u00a0and is unafraid not only to question the whole notion of place but also to return another unflinching question: \u201cWhy must we have a place in the world?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Neel<\/span>\u00a0Mukherjee\u00a0is the author of three novels,\u00a0<\/em>A Life Apart\u00a0(2010), which won the Vodafone-Crossword Book Award in India and the Writers\u2019 Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel;\u00a0<\/em>The Lives of Others\u00a0(2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Prize for best second novel; and\u00a0<\/em>A State of Freedom\u00a0(2017). He divides his time between London and the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Ethics today means not being at home in one\u2019s house. \u2014Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia   There appears to have been some contestation in the published form In a\u00a0Free State was to assume. Subtitled A Novel with Two Supporting Narratives, V. S. Naipaul\u2019s 1971 masterpiece features the eponymous novel, two stories which he calls \u201csupporting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22669],"tags":[32992,32994,32998,16711,32996,32990,924,5872,32995,32993,32997,6051,32991],"class_list":["post-121748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revisited","tag-adorno","tag-aleksander-hemon","tag-andre-deutsch","tag-avant-garde","tag-displacement","tag-in-a-free-state","tag-james-wood","tag-realism","tag-shaun-tan","tag-the-enigma-of-arrival","tag-the-loss-of-el-dorado","tag-the-world-is-what-it-is","tag-v-s-naipual"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDisplacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s \u2018In a Free State\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u2018In A Free State\u2019 was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries, but its revolutionary nature is even more apparent today.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State by Neel Mukherjee\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 20, 2018 \u2013   Ethics today means not being at home in one\u2019s house. \u2014Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia   There appears to have been some contestation in the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-02-20T16:00:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-02-20T20:21:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Neel Mukherjee\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Neel Mukherjee\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Neel Mukherjee\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8fc73f716ecc115885631819f178175c\"},\"headline\":\"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-02-20T16:00:53+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-02-20T20:21:53+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\"},\"wordCount\":2131,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Adorno\",\"Aleksander Hemon\",\"Andre Deutsch\",\"avant-garde\",\"Displacement\",\"In A Free State\",\"James Wood\",\"realism\",\"Shaun Tan\",\"The Enigma of Arrival\",\"The Loss of El Dorado\",\"The World Is What It Is\",\"V. S. Naipual\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Revisited\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\",\"name\":\"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s \u2018In a Free State\u2019\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-02-20T16:00:53+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-02-20T20:21:53+00:00\",\"description\":\"\u2018In A Free State\u2019 was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries, but its revolutionary nature is even more apparent today.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8fc73f716ecc115885631819f178175c\",\"name\":\"Neel Mukherjee\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f1a527cc104a0ac4e4b994e817833d05640ab1d340e0de7a5e6fbd69b2378ba9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f1a527cc104a0ac4e4b994e817833d05640ab1d340e0de7a5e6fbd69b2378ba9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Neel Mukherjee\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/nmukherjee\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s \u2018In a Free State\u2019","description":"\u2018In A Free State\u2019 was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries, but its revolutionary nature is even more apparent today.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State by Neel Mukherjee","og_description":"February 20, 2018 \u2013   Ethics today means not being at home in one\u2019s house. \u2014Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia   There appears to have been some contestation in the","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2018-02-20T16:00:53+00:00","article_modified_time":"2018-02-20T20:21:53+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1000,"height":500,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Neel Mukherjee","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Neel Mukherjee","Est. reading time":"11 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/"},"author":{"name":"Neel Mukherjee","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8fc73f716ecc115885631819f178175c"},"headline":"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State","datePublished":"2018-02-20T16:00:53+00:00","dateModified":"2018-02-20T20:21:53+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/"},"wordCount":2131,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg","keywords":["Adorno","Aleksander Hemon","Andre Deutsch","avant-garde","Displacement","In A Free State","James Wood","realism","Shaun Tan","The Enigma of Arrival","The Loss of El Dorado","The World Is What It Is","V. S. Naipual"],"articleSection":["Revisited"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/","name":"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s \u2018In a Free State\u2019","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg","datePublished":"2018-02-20T16:00:53+00:00","dateModified":"2018-02-20T20:21:53+00:00","description":"\u2018In A Free State\u2019 was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries, but its revolutionary nature is even more apparent today.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/covers_102843-copy.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/rereading-v-s-naipauls-free-state\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul\u2019s In a Free State"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8fc73f716ecc115885631819f178175c","name":"Neel Mukherjee","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f1a527cc104a0ac4e4b994e817833d05640ab1d340e0de7a5e6fbd69b2378ba9?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f1a527cc104a0ac4e4b994e817833d05640ab1d340e0de7a5e6fbd69b2378ba9?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Neel Mukherjee"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/nmukherjee\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121748"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121799,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121748\/revisions\/121799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}