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 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 A Writer s People written by V.S. Naipaul and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer’s People by V. S. Naipaul is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers. For the ‘serious traveller’, one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our author’s purpose, then, ‘is not literary criticism or biography’, but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul’s own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi.
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 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 Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
Download or read book The World is what it is written by Patrick French and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul is the most compelling literary figure of the last fifty years. Producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and non-fiction, his is a gift born of a forceful, visionary impulse. With great feeling for his formidable body of work, and exclusive access to his private papers and personal recollections, Patrick French has produced a luminous and astonishing account of this enigmatic genius. V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, into an Indian family. French examines early privations, Naipaul’s life within a displaced community and his talent and fierce ambition at school, which won him a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. He describes how, once in England, homesickness and depression struck with great force, and the ways in which Naipaul, supported by his first wife, overcame his ‘double exile’, culminating in the production of early masterpieces such as A House for Mr Biswas, An Area of Darkness and In a Free State . Through the uncertainties of life in London, and later in Wiltshire, Naipaul and his wife were to stay together for over four decades, even after he embarked on an intense twenty-five-year love affair. As his reputation grew, as prizes and accolades were bestowed, as a second wave of breathtaking creation generated A Bend in the River, Among the Believers and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul found and sustained an extraordinary position both outside and at the centre of literary culture. Researched with the full cooperation of its Nobel Prize-winning subject, Patrick French traces with sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight the roots of V.S. Naipaul’s unparalleled gift, in what will become a landmark in biography.
Download or read book Half a Life written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.
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 A Way in the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author—and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."—The New York Times “Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.” So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.
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 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 winner’s stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author. 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 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.
Download or read book Among the Believers written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author gives us – on the basis of his own intensive seventeen month journey across the Asian continent – an unprecedented revelation of the Islamic world. • “A brilliant report…. A book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events” (Newsweek). With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books and won him international acclaim (“There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him” – Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the ferment inside the nations of Islam – in a book that combines the fascinations of the great works of travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original, and idiosyncratic political mind. He takes us into four countries in the throes of “Islamization” – countries that, in their ardor to build new societies based entirely on the fundamental laws of Islam, have violently rejected the “materialism” of the technologically advanced nations that have long supported them. He brings us close to the people of Islam – how they live and work, the role of faith in their lives, how they see their place in the modern world.
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.
Download or read book A House for Mr Biswas written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous -- and endless -- struggle to weaken their hold over him, and purchase a house of his own.
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.
