A life-long bachelor a few years from retirement and without achievement in his career drastically changes everything in a few sudden bursts of inspiration. Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is a novella by V.S. Naipaul detailing the how an average man achieved the one great achievement in his life.

The titular character is a middle management lifer in the late 1950s/early 1960s London with retirement slowly getting closer when he suddenly falls for a twice widowed woman and during a holiday finds inspiration to create a program for retirees for his company. Naipaul creates a mediocre man living an eccentrically self-regulated life that suddenly changes everything up not once but twice and sees how things turn out. The pacing is pretty good and the second characters alright, but Naipaul excelled in portraying his main character’s arc which was both triumphant—albeit all too brief—and sad all too predictable when you look at the whole novella.

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is only 126 pages long, but V.S Naipual shows the humdrum of a middling man whose one burst of inspiration is just a blip in his life. ( )

An ageing company librarian suddenly has a creative moment - a scheme for ex-employees. At last Mr. Stone has a success in what has been a conventional life. But the joy of success is only fully experienced in the conception and first flush of creation. What happens to his scheme spoils the burst of enthusiasm Mr. Stone once had, and leaves him disappointed as if he had produced something fraudulent.

A short, expertly written little book.

Studies in bitter and twisted by Coetzee, Faye and Naipaul.

How do bitter and twisted, lonely, emotionally crippled older men start out? Men whose relationships, if any, have always soured early, men whose jobs are all that sustain them, mediocre jobs with colleagues who never become friends. Men whose strict weekend routines stop loneliness from being more than an uneasy feeling which never quite comes to the surface. Never quite acknowledged.

They start out as bitter and twisted Youth. In this novel by Coetzee, we see the establishment of such a being, a young man who thinks somehow that his cold alienating ways will make him a poet. When it turns out that he has nothing more in him than the capacity to be a computer programmer, and an undistinguished one of those, he sees his future as a hollow meaningless thing. We do not find out if his life remained the mean and nasty existence he portended.

Enter Nagasaki. Here we meet a man who might be the person Youth foresaw. Towards the end of his nondescript career he is alone, as far as we know he has never had a meaningful relationship with anybody, including his relations. When not at work he is at home, when at home, the person he talks to is himself. He has no friends, no interests, nothing about him justifies his carbon footprint. Like Youth, he is given the opportunity to live, to behave with largesse, to give. Like Youth he cannot do that. Both of them experience discomfort, unease at their utter meanness of spirit, but neither is capable of being a new person.

Is this inevitable? Enter Mr Stone of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion.

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/studies-in-bitter-and-twi... ( )

The exceeding depressing autumn of Mr. Stone’s life; a novel of aging that makes us look at how we take measure of our lives – with success always outside our reach. Managing to come up with a money-making idea just prior to retiring, Mr. Stone’s fortunes suffer a sudden, meteoric rise. Told with droll wit and Naipaul’s ever-acute penetrating eye, this book seethes with a rather brutal realism. ( )

a gem! ( )