“The Suffrage of Elvira”: 23 Slides
Years later scholars and critics would preoccupy themselves with Naipaul’s “politics”, his hybrid “identity”; or his satiric scalpel so merciless on a society too fragile. But as young readers in we marveled at his craftsmanship.Guyana’s realist prose masters, Jan Carew and Edgar Mittelholzer, had written serious novels, but nothing as sparkling and entertaining (yet serious in purpose) as The Suffrage of Elvira.
An academic writing about the experience of reading, about the state a book puts you in, describes precisely what many of us felt: “a peculiar process of immersion, of filtered double-consciousness, a two-way involution of self into character and text into voice.” A few readers thought Naipaul exposed too much (of the East Indian community) too brilliantly; others were irked by his “treatment” of non-Indians. The more creatively ambitious paid attention to his shaping of sentences and paragraphs, his characters’ pan-beating speech rhythms; how Naipaul ‘captured’ the frustration and desire churning beneath the surface of everyday existence. The Suffrage of Elvira dealt with “the coming of democracy” to colonial society. While we await fresh talent and new fiction that explores the dislocations in our lives after “the coming of Independence ” or “the coming of Socialism”, here from pages of crystal-clear prose, illustrating one way it could be done, 23 slides. – W.W.
