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?
Written in the politically turbulent 1970s, Guerrillas takes aim at the sacred cows and myths of revolutionaries—how so many of them “huff and puff,” knowing that the house will never blow down. From the safest places come the bravest words.
Naipaul’s bleak tale also takes aim at flaws in Marxist and revolutionary ideology—at the idea that one can predict or manipulate how the “revolution” will turn out. His characters are lost souls trying to navigate a postcolonial world where racism, classism, and conflicting ideals create a festering unrest that no one knows how to fix.
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“V. S. Naipaul…brings an uncompromising intelligence to a unique perspective on the world at large, as it is seen by the multiracial, multicultural children of Empire who as a consequence of their mixed heritage, are political orphans in perpetual exile. Guerrillas, half dream and half news story, outlines the ugly cracks in the ideological jigsaw of a Caribbean island just next door to Naipaul’s native Trinidad—a state where ‘everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla’..No easy answers for Naipaul: just ‘hints of the failure and shoddiness to come.’”
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Kirkus Reviews