V S Naipaul Man And Writer

Author : Gillian Dooley
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 161117886X
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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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 164 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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307269485
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 9780330522892
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307370615
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Patrick French
Publisher : Viking Canada
ISBN 13 : 9780670045297
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307744035
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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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

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 9780940322387
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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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

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307789314
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0307595617
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307370593
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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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.