Could the formal inventiveness of Naipaul’s novel have been overlooked, or at least considered secondary because of the realist mode (and material) within which he wrote, combining political observation, journalistic dispassion, and a very fine-grained psychological realism with its attendant emphasis on interiority? Thinking about In A Free State gave me my own book. Nowadays, of course, no novel is considered to be experimental unless it’s autofiction, or written in numbered paragraphs, or printed with white letters against a black background, or has orthographical hi-jinks going on, or whatever. While rereading the book, I was struck by how daring the formal experimentation was, and also, how unostentatious and matter-of-fact about its formal audacity and novelty.

Instead, they cohere through theme or meaning the theme is displacement. Five narratives, none of which joins to another in any of the ways you’d expect, such as by continuity of story, shared characters, elements of plot. There is a prologue and an epilogue, each of which has a title, and there are those two ‘supporting narratives’, again with their individual titles (‘One Out Of Many’ and ‘Tell Me Who To Kill’).

The subtitle of Naipaul’s book, ‘A novel with two supporting narratives’, is slightly misleading: there are actually four supporting narratives, if you take, as Naipaul does, the eponymous and longest narrative, ‘In A Free State’, as the ‘novel’ of the subtitle.

Naipaul’s 1971 novel, In A Free State, with which my novel, if you’ll permit me to compare the great with the small (this is not humble bragging the facts speak for themselves – Naipaul is a Nobel laureate and one of the greatest novelists of the last century I am only three books old), is an attempt at a conversation. Neel Mukherjee: The structure of the novel is inspired by V.S.

A life apart by neel mukherjee