Download or read book The Mystic Masseur written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a Dickensian novel that traces the unlikely career of a failed schoolteacher and village masseur who becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. “No one else … seems able to employ prose fiction so deeply as the very voice of exile.” —The New York Review of Books In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. 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 journey 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.
Download or read book Miguel Street written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the residents of Miguel Street, a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital, their neighbourhood is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There’s Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build “the thing without a name;” Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion; Big Foot, the dreaded bully with glass tear ducts; and the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. Their lives (and the legends their neighbours construct around them) are rendered by V. S. Naipaul with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion in this tender, funny novel.
Download or read book The Mystic Masseur written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of Naipaul’s twelve novels tells of the meteoric rise and hilarious metamorphosis of Ganesh Ramsumair from failed primary schoolteacher and struggling masseur to author, revered mystic, peerless politician and the most popular man in Trinidad.
Download or read book The Mystic Masseur s Wife written by MAHARAJ and published by Peepal Tree Press. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of V.S. Naipaul's satire on Hindu life in Trinidad, The Mystic Masseur, the protagonist, Ganesh Ramsumair, caps his rise to fame as a colonial politician, by transforming himself into an English gentleman, G. Ramsay Muir, and heading off to England. In Naipaul's novel, Ganesh's wife, Leela, plays a very secondary, indeed recessive role, though there are occasional clues that she has a clearer grasp of reality than her husband. In the hidden spaces of Naipaul's novel, J. Vijay Maharaj creates a quite different kind of story for Leela, who decides that when her husband abandons Trinidad for England, she is too much attached to her life on the island to follow him. All this is relayed to the author by Leela in her later years, in a series of tape-recordings, which form the basis for the novel. This is much more than a necessary rewriting of the male-centredness of VS Naipaul's perspective, though Maharaj creates an inventive and often richly humorous counter-narrative within that novel's plotlines, as well as a dynamic afterlife for Leela after Naipaul's novel ends. Maharaj creates for Leela an utterly convincing and compelling voice -- earthy, shrewd and in love with life.
Download or read book The Suffrage of Elvira written by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul and published by Harmondsworth : Penguin. This book was released on 1969 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, an old, comically timid and absent-minded man, Surujpat Harbans, runs for office, aided by superstition, bribes, and an aggressive compaign.
Download or read book Guerrillas written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a novel of exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. “A brilliant novel in every way.… [It] shimmers with artistic certainty.” —The New York Times Book Review Set on a troubled Carribbean island, where “everybody wants to fight his own little war,” where “everyone is a guerrilla,” the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island – subdued now, almost withdrawn – to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed – excited – by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives.
Download or read book The Enigma of Arrival written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times
Download or read book A Bend in the River written by V.s. Naipaul and published by Picador. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a novel of the politics and society of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new
Download or read book The Masque of Africa written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Africa is critical for all concerned with the world today: in what promises to be his final great work of reportage, one of the keenest observers of the continent surveys the effects of belief and religion on the disparate peoples of Africa. The Masque of Africa is Nobel Prize-winning V. S. Naipaul's first major work of non-fiction to be published since his internationally bestselling Beyond Belief. Like all of Naipaul's great works of non-fiction, The Masque of Africa is superficially a book of travels — full of people, stories and landscapes he visits — but it also encompasses a larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (whether in indigenous animisms, faiths imposed by other cultures, or even the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization.
Download or read book Finding the Center written by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book V S Naipaul Man and Writer written by Gillian Dooley and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the uncompromising artistic vision of the internationally acclaimed writer A survey of the life and work of the 2001 Nobel Laureate for Literature, V. S. Naipaul, Man and Writer introduces readers to the writer widely viewed as a curmudgeonly novelist who finds special satisfaction in overturning the vogue presuppositions of his peers. Gillian Dooley takes an expansive look at Naipaul's literary career, from Miguel Street to Magic Seeds. From readings of his fiction, nonfiction, travel books, and volumes of letters, she elucidates the connections between Naipaul's personal experiences as a Hindu Indian from Trinidad living an expatriate life and the precise, euphonious prose with which he is synonymous. Dooley assesses each of Naipaul's major publications in light of his stated intentions and beliefs, and she traces the development of his writing style over a forty-year career. Devoting separate chapters to three of his chief works, A House for Mr. Biswas, In a Free State, and The Enigma of Arrival, she analyzes their critical reception and the primacy of Naipaul's specific narrative style and voice. Dooley emphasizes that it is, above all, Naipaul's refusal to compromise his vision in order to flatter or appease that has made him a controversial writer. At the same time she sees the integrity with which he reports his subjective response to the world as essential to the lasting success of his work.
Download or read book The Nightwatchman s Occurrence Book written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-04-02 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (includes The Suffrage of Elvira, A Flag on the Island and Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion) Written early in V. S. Naipaul’s prolific career, these three works of fiction — two novels and a collection of stories — are ample evidence of his cosmopolitan reach and his seemingly effortless command of broad comedy and acute observation.
Download or read book The Writer and the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional and sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection and reportage – many of which have been unavailable for some time – are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies and despair, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding. ‘All [of these essays] are worth reading (and rereading), both for the contemporary and historical information and insight they artfully impart and for what they tell us about a uniquely complex writer’ Spectator
Download or read book The Mystic Masseur Miguel Street written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2002 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mystic Masseur tells the story of Ganesh and his journey from failed primary school teacher and masseur to author, revered mystic and MBE. Miguel Street, a very early novel, won the Somerset Maugham Award on its appearance in 1959.
Download or read book After Empire written by Michael Gorra and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire—Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie—have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar—a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces. After Empire provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity—and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured.
Download or read book The Mystic Masseur written by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1964 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize winner's first novel traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic and the most beloved politician in 1940s Trinidad. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The Mimic Men written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sober novel about a tempestuous and tormented soul carrying the burdens of postcolonialism in London. Winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Award.
