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Goldsboro Books

The Mystic Masseur

The Mystic Masseur

Publisher Vanguard

Genre:

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • USA First Edition
  • Hardcover


Regular price £1,500.00
Regular price Sale price £1,500.00
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  • Professionally Packed

    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    A very good first American edition, signed by the author. In the publisher's black cloth. Very good quality dust jacket with a small hole on the spine, and minor wearing on the top and bottom of the spine.

About the book

In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novelhis firstV. 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. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the islands medical practitioners of choice. As one character observes, I know the sort of doctors they have in Trinidad. They think nothing of killing two, three people before breakfast.

Ganeshs ascent is variously aided and impeded by a Dickensian cast of rogues and eccentrics. Theres his skeptical wife, Leela, whose schooling has made her excessively, fond. of; punctuation: marks!; and Leelas father, Ramlogan, a man of startling mood changes and an ever-ready cutlass. Theres the aunt known as The Great Belcher. There are patients pursued by malign clouds or afflicted with an amorous fascination with bicycles. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidads dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.

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