Naipaul, V. S

New York. 1975. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394498984. 250 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Gamarello. keywords: Literature Caribbean Trinidad England India . FROM THE PUBLISHER - In GUERRILLAS, V. S. Naipaul directly addresses himself to his most essential themes: exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and the pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. Set on a troubled Caribbean island, where ‘everybody wants to fight his own little war,' where ‘everybody is a guerrilla,' the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island - subdued now, almost withdrawn - to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed - excited - by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young half-breed guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives. inventory #1122 ISBN: 0394498984.