Download or read book V S Naipaul s Journeys written by Sanjay Krishnan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up in Trinidad in an Indian immigrant community, and his depiction of colonized peoples has often been harshly judged by critics as unsympathetic, misguided, racist, and sexist. Yet other readers praise his work as containing uncommonly perceptive historical and psychological insight. In V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys, Sanjay Krishnan offers new perspectives on the distinctiveness and power of Naipaul’s writing, as well as his shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul’s life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have dominated discussions of his writing. Krishnan reads Naipaul as self-subverting and self-critical, engaged in describing his own implication in what he saw as the malaise of the postcolonial world. Krishnan brings together close readings of major novels with considerations of Naipaul’s work as a united project, as well as nuanced assessments of Naipaul’s political commentary on ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Krishnan provides a Naipaul for contemporary times, illustrating how his life and work shed light on debates regarding migration, diversity, sectarianism, displacement, and other global challenges.
Download or read book A Writer s People written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers an eloquent, candid, wide-ranging narrative that delves into the sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation. “Bracing, surprising.... A meditation on art and life.” —The New York Review of Books V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of "fitting one civilization to another." In A Writer's People, he takes us into this process that has shaped both his writing and his life. Naipaul discusses the writers to whom he was exposed early on—Derek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert, and his father, among them—and his first encounters with literary culture. He illuminates the ways in which the writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian writers both reveal and conceal the authors themselves and their nation. And he brings the same scrutiny to bear on his own life: his early years in Trinidad; the empty spaces in his family history; his ever-evolving reactions to the more complicated India he would encounter for the first time at age thirty.
Download or read book V S Naipaul and World Literature written by Vijay Mishra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V. S. Naipaul is a major and controversial figure in postcolonial and world literature. This book provides a challenging and uncompromisingly honest study that engages with history, genre theory, aesthetics, and global literary culture, with close reference to Naipaul's published and archival material. In his fiction and creative histories, the definition of the modern idea of world literature is informed by the importance of an artistic ordering of perception. Although often expressing ideas that are prejudicial and morally repugnant, there is an honesty in his writings where one finds extraordinary insights into how life is experienced within colonial structures of power. These colonial structures provided no abstract unity to the field of literary expression and ignored vernacular cultures. The book argues that a universal ideology of the aesthetic, transcending time, regions, and languages, provides world literature with a unity which is possible only within a critical universal humanism attuned to heroic readings of texts and cultures.
Download or read book Literary Occasions written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven essays on reading, writing, and identity—which have been brought together for the first time—from the Nobel Prize-winning author. • “He brings to [nonfiction] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought…. I can no longer imagine the world without Naipaul’s writing.” —Vivian Gornick, Los Angeles Times Book Review Here the subject is Naipaul’s literary evolution: the books that delighted him as a child; the books he wrote as a young man; the omnipresent predicament of trying to master an essentially metropolitan, imperial art form as an Asian colonial from a New World plantation island. He assesses Joseph Conrad, the writer most frequently cited as his forebear, and, in his celebrated Nobel Lecture, “Two Worlds,” traces the full arc of his own career. Literary Occasions is an indispensable addition to the Naipaul oeuvre, penetrating, elegant, and affecting.
Download or read book The Loss of El Dorado written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the sixteenth century belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay the fabulous kingdom of El Dorado. Two centuries of multinational intrigue followed, personified in the rivalled quest for the mythical kingdom of gold between the aging conquistador Antonio de Berrio and Sir Walter Ralegh, and culminating in the brutal stewardship of Thomas Picton, the English governor put on trial for the torture of a fourteen-year-old mulatto girl. Relating this labyrinthine story with clarity and novelistic drama, V. S. Naipaul accomplishes an unparalleled feat of historical writing.
Download or read book The World Is What It Is written by Patrick French and published by Viking Canada. This book was released on 2008-08-12 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul's childhood in Trinidad, Patrick French gives us the boy born to an Indian family who wins a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 17. London in the 1950s offers his first literary success, but homesickness almost defeats Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an English woman who will stand by him for 4 decades, even as he embarks on a 24-year love affair which will feed his dizzying creativity. Informed by exclusive access to the subject's private papers and personal recollections, French's revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.
Download or read book The Writer and the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For forty years V. S. Naipaul has been traveling and, through his writing, creating one of the most wide-ranging and sustained meditations on our world. Now, for the first time, his finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage -- nearly all of them heretofore out of print -- are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in the redemptive power of modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his own experience. Whether writing about the Muslim invasions of India, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he has demonstrated again and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which power works, of the universal relation of the exploiter and the exploited. And no one has put forth a more consistently eloquent defense of the dignity of the individual and the value of civilization. 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.
Download or read book A House for Mr Biswas written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Picador. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Chinese edition of A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul. It is a story of Mr. Biswas's struggle for independence, but more importantly, it is his fight for dignity and a life with meaning. A House for Mr. Biswas is touted as Naipaul's finest novel. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.
Download or read book The Way of the World written by William Congreve and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2020-08-27T16:51:39Z with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World was first performed in 1700 at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. It was not well received, and as a result Congreve vowed never to write for the stage again—a vow he kept. Nonetheless the comedy was printed in the same year and has come to be regarded as the author’s masterpiece, a classic of Restoration drama. In a world still reacting against the puritanism of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, Restoration drama had slowly transitioned from celebrating the licentiousness and opulence of the newly returned court to the more thoughtful and refined comedy of manners that was to dominate the English stage of 18th century. In one way Congreve’s The Way of the World is the last (and best) of its type, and in another way, it is the forerunner of a style that is echoed even now. The play centers on the love affair of Mirabell and Millamant who are prevented from marrying by a number of obstacles, not the least of which is Mirabell’s past dalliance with Millamant’s aunt’s affections. Intricate, witty, and amusing, the comedy nevertheless concludes with no clear heroes or heroines—one of the things that makes it such an incisive portrait of human experience and an enduring example of its type. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Download or read book Collected Short Fiction of V S Naipaul written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time: the Nobel Prize-winning author’s stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author. • “Naipaul is the world’s writer, a master of language and perception.” —The New York Times Book Review Over the course of his distinguished career, V. S. Naipaul has written a remarkable array of short fiction that moves from Trinidad to London to Africa. Here are the stories from his Somerset Maugham Award–winning Miguel Street, in which he takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital to meet, among others, Man-Man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion. The tales in A Flag on the Island, meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. And in the celebrated title story from the Booker Prize– winning In a Free State, an English couple traveling in an unnamed African country discover, under a veneer of civilization, a landscape of squalor and ethnic bloodletting. No writer has rendered our postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face.
Download or read book V S Naipaul and World Literature written by Vijay Mishra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with Naipaul's literary corpus and reconceptualizes what it means to be a writer of world literature.
Download or read book Reading and Writing written by V. S. Naipaul and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition. But for the young V. S. Naipaul, there was a great distance between the wish and its fulfillment. To become a writer, he would have to find ways of understanding three very different cultures: his family's half-remembered Indian homeland, the West Indian colonial society in which he grew up, and the wholly foreign world of the English novels he read. In this essay of literary autobiography, V. S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in England, and his earliest attempts at writing, seeking the experiences of life and reading that shaped his imagination and his growth as a writer. He pays particular attention to the traumas of India under its various conquerors and the painful sense of dereliction and loss that shadows writers' attempts to capture the country and its people in prose. Naipaul's profound reflections on the relations between personal or historical experience and literary form, between the novel and the world, reveal how he came to discover both his voice and the subjects of his writing, and how he learned to turn sometimes to fiction, sometimes to the travel narrative, to portray them truthfully. Along the way he offers insights into the novel's prodigious development as a form for depicting and interpreting society in the nineteenth century and its diminishing capacity to do the same in the twentiethÑa task that, in his view, passed to the creative energies of the early cinema. As a child trying to read, I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city. ... What I didn't know, even after I had written my early books of fiction ... was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. But it couldn't take me all the way. -V.S. Naipaul, from Reading & Writing
Download or read book V S Naipaul written by Mohit Kumar Ray and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2002 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul Has Claimed That All His Work Is Really One And He Has Been Writing One Big Book All These Years; Also, Considering The World He Has Stepped Into And The World He Has To Look At, He Cannot Be A Professional Novelist In The Old Sense. In His Early Youth Naipaul Took Up The Vocation Of A Writer As His Religion And, Since The Beginning Five Decades Ago, Has Drawn On His Intensely Personal Experience Of An Uprooted Person Adrift In The World, His Experience Of The Two Worlds To None Of Which He Could Really Belong An Experience That Imparts The Authentic Voice To His Works Both Non-Fiction And Fiction Enriched By A Distinct Autobiographical Flavour. Naipaul Himself Is Split Into His Characters In Whom Are Manifested Subtle Shades Of His Emotions And Traits. He Is Accidental Man, Dangling Man, History Man And The Mimic Man All Rolled Into One. Naipaul Is Also One Of Literature S Great Travellers, And His Absorption Into The Experience Of Rootlessness, The Alienating Effects Of Colonial Past On Today S Postcolonial People Has Taken Him To Africa, South America, India And All Over The World Not In Search Of Roots But In Search Of Rootlessness, And Has Yielded A Rich Harvest Of Travelogues Which Are About Much More Than Travel.An Author Of A Large Number Of Fictional And Non-Fictional Works, Naipaul Continues To Surprise, Excite, Provoke And Move Readers At Every Turn Of His Literary Voyage. Naipaul Has Unseverable Emotional Bond With India Which Remains For Him An Area Of Pain, An Ache For Which One Has A Great Tenderness Yet From Which He Wishes To Separate Himself. The World Of V.S. Naipaul Is The World Of Two Worlds. The Present Volumes Of Papers On Naipaul, Led By Naipaul S Nobel Lecture, Offer Illuminating Perspectives And Interesting Explorations Into This Rich, Enigmatic, Sad, Hilarious, And Fascinating World Of Naipaul.
Download or read book V S Naipaul Caribbean Writing and Caribbean Thought written by William Ghosh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul was one of the most influential and controversial writers of the twentieth century. His writings on colonialism and its aftermath, on migration and landscape, and on cultural loss and creativity, were both admired and criticised by a wide global audience. But what of his relationship to the region of his birth? Born in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, and spending his professional life in England, Naipaul could be dismissive of his Caribbean background. He presented himself as a citizen of nowhere, or else, of the globalized, postcolonial world. However, this obscures his intense competition, fierce disagreements and close collaboration with other Caribbean intellectuals, both as a schoolchild in colonial Trinidad, and as an internationally celebrated author. V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought looks again at Naipaul's relationship with his birthplace. It shows that that the decolonising Caribbean was the crucible in which Naipaul's style and outlook were formed. Moreover, understanding Naipaul's place in the history of the region's politics and letters sheds new light on the work of celebrated contemporaries, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Maryse Condè, Elsa Goveia and Eric Williams, Sylvia Wynter and C.L.R. James. Literary criticism, intellectual biography, and an essay in the history of ideas, this book offers a new account of Caribbean thought in the decades after independence. It reveals a literary culture of creative vibrancy, in an era of unprecedented change.
Download or read book Conversations with V S Naipaul written by Feroza F. Jussawalla and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together interviews from a thirty-six-year span and reveals a witty, sometimes scathing talker with a free-ranging curiosity. In early interviews, mostly given to such fellow writers and colleagues as Derek Walcott and Eric Roach, Naipul is clipped, brusque, and clearly impatient with interviewers. More recent interviews, given primarily to journalists rather than literary figures, reveal a more mellow Naipaul, often warm, passionate, and forthcoming about his private life.
Download or read book V S Naipaul written by Bruce King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V. S. Naipaul is a reader-friendly introduction to the writing of one of the most influential contemporary authors and the 2001 Nobel laureate in Literature. Bruce King provides a novel by novel analysis of the fiction with attention to structure, significance, and Naipaul's development as a writer, while setting the texts in their autobiographical. philosophical, social, political, colonial and postcolonial contexts. King shows how Naipaul modified Western and Indian literary traditions for the West Indies and then the wider world to become an international writer whose subject matter includes the Caribbean, England, India, Africa, the United States, Argentina, and contemporary Islam. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of V. S. Naipaul now includes an expanded Introduction, and discussion of his most recent novels A Way in the World and Half a Life, his Nobel Lecture, Naipaul's writings on Islam, and a survey of the main criticism by other writers and postcolonial theorists.
Download or read book The Middle Passage written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 1962 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naipul's first work of travel writing is an account of his journey in 1950 from London to his birthplace, Trinidad. He offers a record of his impressions there and elsewhere in the West Indies and South America, and examines their common heritage of colonialism and slavery.
