This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such asA Bend in the RiverandGuerillasare defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom, asserts hisimaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric

In Tales of the Metric System, Imraan Coovadia's sere, direct sentences light a fire as he parses South Africa across the decades, from 1970 into the present. As Salman Rushdie used Indian independence in Midnight's Children, Coovadia takes his homeland's transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up to the light and examining it from multiple perspectives. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist's granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice - each story takes...

In Tales of the Metric System, Imraan Coovadia's sere, direct sentences light a fire as he parses South Africa across the decades, from 1970 into the present. As Salman Rushdie used Indian independence in Midnight's Children, Coovadia takes his homeland's transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up to the light and examining it from multiple perspectives. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist's granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice - each story takes...