The Mimic Men
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
The Mimic Men
Buy for $24.51
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Sam Dastor
-
By:
-
V. S. Naipaul
About this listen
Former government minister Ralph Singh is the perpetual outsider: displaced, disillusioned, and now living in exile, Ralph reflects on his earlier life and the searing effects of colonialism. Ralph's constant estrangement sees him ever attempting to fit into various communities, only to find home in more transient spaces. Born on the tropical island of Isabella, he is one of West India's many "Mimic Men".
Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul's sixth novel is a brutal and perceptive commentary on the postcolonial condition of the colonial man.
Download the accompanying reference guide.©1967 V. S. Naipaul (P)2017 Naxos AudioBooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 578
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 380
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 388
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Guerrillas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 7
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power?
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
Reactionary Islamophobia 101
- By Kobugi on 03-13-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book, and Other Comic Inventions
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance, Ron Butler, Vikas Adam
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7
V. S. Naipaul's legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction - two novels and a collection of stories - that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humor.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 7
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 20
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Insightful & informative!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-03-24
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Million Mutinies Now
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 24 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 20
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 18
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 18
Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ
- By JK on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 578
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 380
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 388
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Guerrillas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 7
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power?
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
Reactionary Islamophobia 101
- By Kobugi on 03-13-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book, and Other Comic Inventions
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance, Ron Butler, Vikas Adam
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7
V. S. Naipaul's legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction - two novels and a collection of stories - that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humor.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 7
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 20
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Insightful & informative!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-03-24
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Million Mutinies Now
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 24 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 20
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 18
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 18
Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ
- By JK on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 340
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 286
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 286
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
2 out of 5 stars
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 59
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 54
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 54
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 27
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 27
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Pretty Good
- By Joan on 09-23-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 117
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 89
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 147
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 135
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 134
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Mixed feelings.
- By anton on 10-27-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 626
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 543
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 538
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
-
The Jewel in the Crown
- Raj Quartet
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 273
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 241
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 241
In the India of 1942, two rapes take place simultaneously - that of an English girl in Mayapore, and that of India by the British. In each, physical violence, racial animosity, the coercion of the weak by the strong all play their part, but playing a part too are love, affection, loyalty, and recognition that the last division of all to be overcome is the colour of the skin.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
This is one to get
- By Jeremy on 10-28-14
By: Paul Scott
-
The Bell Jar
- By: Sylvia Plath
- Narrated by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8,990
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8,012
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7,983
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
A must-read for every woman
- By Julie W. Capell on 05-06-16
By: Sylvia Plath
-
Never Let Me Go
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 10,481
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8,381
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 8,394
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Be patient; it will pay off
- By Kc on 05-23-05
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
-
White Teeth
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 786
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 679
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 672
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 224
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 196
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 197
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
-
Love in the Time of Cholera
- By: Gabriel García Márquez
- Narrated by: Armando Durán
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 3,580
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,102
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 3,118
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people's lives together for more than half a century. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral....
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
When love is sick
- By Vira on 09-02-13