The Chip-Chip Gatherers

Nov 12, 2025 7:59 PM

Author:Shiva Naipaul

Shiva Naipaul was the brother of V. S. Naipaul and author of Firefles and The Chip-Chip Gatherers. The Chip-Chip Gatherers, his second novel, was winner of the Whitbread Literary Award in 1973 and is set in Naipaul's native Trinidad. It includes a new foreword by Amit Chaudhuri.

The crowded, ramshackle community of the Settlement in Trinidad is at the mercy of a tyrant. Egbert Ramsaran, the proud owner of the Ramsaran Transport Company, who has become the richest man in town through sheer strength of will, is a capricious, eccentric despot who loves nobody and whom nobody can afford to ignore. There is his son Wilbert, bullied into passivity and failure; Vishnu the downtrodden grocer without grace or hope; the beautiful, unpredictable Sushila, who tries to wield her seductive powers over Ramsaran; and her daughter, Sita, intelligent enough to know that escape is possible. Their intricately woven lives are perfectly captured in all their pathos, comedy and humanity.

Reviews

As austerity ripples on in this century, the book's combination of escapism and relevance continues to draw me in. The language is so inventive, the characters so brilliantly (often absurdly) captured, and their behaviour so close to pantomime, that it renders the whole a garishly compelling and thought-provoking read

—— Elle-Violet Bramley , Guardian

Black-as-pitch Hollywood farce

—— The Guardian

The Day of the Locust has scenes of extraordinary power. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress and the uncanny medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background set off by those vividly drawn grotesques

—— F. Scott Fitzgerald

A talented and somewhat neglected author... wonderfully imaginative and slightly disturbed

—— Daily Telegraph

It certainly packs a wallop

—— John Dos Passos

These novels say more about the way we live now- and the things that brought us to our present pass - than any other work of fiction I can think of

—— L.E. Sissman , New Yorker

What this novel does is so magnificent. One could say that this book has the power to unite us

—— TVA Television – Canada

[Serdar Ozkan] is already being mentioned together with Paulo Coelho, Richard Bach, and even Saint-Exupery.

—— Corriere della Sera, Italy

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