Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781509832125
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
An area of darkness: Semi-autobiographical account of the author's first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent
India
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781509832125
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
An area of darkness: Semi-autobiographical account of the author's first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781509832125
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
An area of darkness: Semi-autobiographical account of the author's first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent
India: A Wounded Civilization
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years before. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India’s manifold complexities.
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years before. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India’s manifold complexities.
The Indian Trilogy
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509852387
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 1169
Book Description
AN AREA OF DARKNESS 'Brilliant ... tender, lyrical, explosive' Observer V.S. Naipaul was twenty-nine when he first visited India. This is his semi-autobiographical account-at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered-a revelation both of the country and of himself. INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION 'A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts' The Times Prompted by the Emergency of 1975, Naipaul casts a more analytical eye, convinced that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration. INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW 'Indispensable for anyone who wants seriously to come to grips with the experience of India' New York Times Book Review It is twenty-six years since Naipaul's first trip to India. Taking an anti-clockwise journey around the metropolises-including Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Delhi-he focuses on the country's development since Independence. The author recedes, allowing Indians to tell the stories, and a dynamic oral history of the country emerges.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509852387
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 1169
Book Description
AN AREA OF DARKNESS 'Brilliant ... tender, lyrical, explosive' Observer V.S. Naipaul was twenty-nine when he first visited India. This is his semi-autobiographical account-at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered-a revelation both of the country and of himself. INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION 'A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts' The Times Prompted by the Emergency of 1975, Naipaul casts a more analytical eye, convinced that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration. INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW 'Indispensable for anyone who wants seriously to come to grips with the experience of India' New York Times Book Review It is twenty-six years since Naipaul's first trip to India. Taking an anti-clockwise journey around the metropolises-including Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Delhi-he focuses on the country's development since Independence. The author recedes, allowing Indians to tell the stories, and a dynamic oral history of the country emerges.
An Area of Darkness
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330529307
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
The first book in V. S. Naipaul’s acclaimed Indian trilogy – with a preface by the author. An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account – at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered – of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. He was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a year. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled . . . The experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing, and engendered a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone. ‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’ – The Times
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330529307
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
The first book in V. S. Naipaul’s acclaimed Indian trilogy – with a preface by the author. An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account – at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered – of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. He was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a year. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled . . . The experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing, and engendered a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone. ‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’ – The Times
A Writer's People
Author: V.S. Naipaul
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330470531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330470531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163
Book Description
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.
The World is what it is
Author: Patrick French
Publisher: Picador USA
ISBN: 9780330433501
Category : Authors, Trinidadian
Languages : en
Pages : 555
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Picador USA
ISBN: 9780330433501
Category : Authors, Trinidadian
Languages : en
Pages : 555
Book Description
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.
The Masque of Africa
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307399974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307399974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
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.
The Enigma of Arrival
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
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
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
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
Reading and Writing
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9780940322387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Book Description
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
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9780940322387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Book Description
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
A House for Mr Biswas
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780330522892
Category : Autonomy (Psychology)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780330522892
Category : Autonomy (Psychology)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
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.