A Hot Country: (Love and Death In a Hot Country) (Twentieth Century Classics)
by Shiva Naipaul

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Book Reviews of A Hot Country: (Love and Death In a Hot Country) (Twentieth Century Classics)

Book Review: Very 'post-colonial'.
Summary: 3 Stars

Like most post-colonial literature (especially from my home country Ireland), 'A Hot Country' chooses to focus on the class in decline rather than the liberated former slaves, the resentful poor, the underclass, the politically disenfranchised, the 'mob'. This has the effect of pandering to the world-view of the assumed middle-class reader, even as it is criticised. And in that view, politics, history and other people are not scientific disciplines that can be analysed or understood with cause and effect precision, but as hazy and hallucinatory as the atmospheric effects created by the grey, mirror-like sea, the mouldering vegetation and the burning sun, as the somnolent lives and minds of the characters, especially Dina. We learn what independence, the increasing totlitarianism of and hostility towards the whites by the Marxist regime means to the declining elite, but the majority black population remain an enigmatic Other, their voices confined to malevolent stares, acts of violence and mass frenzy - the country is hot not just because of the rotting tropical climate, but because the old colonial town is being razed to the ground. Even Dina, the most coherent and least unsympathetic character, poised, as a Christianised Hindustani married to old gentry, between both worlds, seems less a suffering, feeling person, than an idea of what women should be in post-colonial, proto-feminist literature (at one point, she actually says, in conversation: 'Each morning, I have to re-invent myself'. Like you do).

Too many conversations are unnaturally staged to Inform The Reader; too many scenes are set up to be heavily symbolic. The book is written in that kind of verbose journalese you get in Coetzee, studiously trying to avoid the literary, the poetic, the beautiful; but also, by extension, the life-like.

General Books

• Literature & Fiction
• Contemporary
• Literary
• World Literature > Caribbean