In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel–his first–V. 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 island’s 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.”
Ganesh’s ascent is variously aided and
impeded by a Dickensian cast of rogues and eccentrics. There’s his
skeptical wife, Leela, whose schooling has made her excessively,
fond. of; punctuation: marks!; and Leela’s father, Ramlogan, a man
of startling mood changes and an ever-ready cutlass. There’s 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 Trinidad’s dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul
at his most expansive and evocative.