Originally published in 1995. V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent living in the West, has written in many forms. Through an analysis of five works by Naipaul written in different modes and periods of his life, this study posits a relationship between a cultural condition and a choice of genre and narrative, or more specifically between cultural displacement and the writing of autobiography. Examining an aspect of Naipaul’s development as a post-colonial writer, this book is of interest in exploring the way that concepts of self determine the writing of texts. It considers ‘deflected autobiographies’, genre boundaries, quests for origin and expression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
Originally published in 1995. V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent living in the West, has written in many forms. Through an analysis of five works by Naipaul written in different modes and periods of his life, this study posits a relationship between a cultural condition and a choice of genre and narrative, or more specifically between cultural displacement and the writing of autobiography. Examining an aspect of Naipaul’s development as a post-colonial writer, this book is of interest in exploring the way that concepts of self determine the writing of texts. It considers ‘deflected autobiographies’, genre boundaries, quests for origin and expression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a riveting tour de force that examines emigration, dislocation, and dread. “The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.” —The New York Times Book Review No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.
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.
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 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.
"The effects of the displacement of peoples--their forced migration, their deportation, their voluntary emigration, their movement to new lands where they made themselves masters over others, or became subjects of the masters of their new homes--reverberate down the years and are still felt today. The historical violence of the era of empire and colonies echoes in the literature of the descendants of those forcibly moved and the exiles that those processes have made. The voices of its victims are insistent in the literature that has come to be called “post-colonial.” Although the term “post-colonial” is insufficient to capture fully the depth and breadth of those writers that have been labeled by it (for it is itself something of a colonial instrument, ghettoizing writers in English who are still considered to be “foreign”), there is a common bond among the works of those novelists who understand the process of exile and see themselves as exiles--both from their homes and from themselves. In this eloquently argued book with meticulous theoretical groundwork, Dr. Cristina Dascalu presents a most lucid and concise examination of exile. In addition to her negotiation of the term “exile,” what is most original and significant about Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile is the selection of authors. Reaching across national (in terms of country of exile) and ethnic (in terms of region/religion of birth) boundaries, Dr. Dascalu elegantly shows the persistent relevance of the experience and implications of exile to the writing of fiction in the world today. Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul are very distinct authors whose works are not often discussed together in this context. Using Benedict Anderson’s notion of “unimagined communities,” among other critical lenses, she makes significant connections between the way exile functions as a theme and as a condition for their writing."--pub. desc.
The book is about V. S. Naipaul who was born in Trinidad in 1932. At the age of 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to study literature at Oxford. He never returned to live in Trinidad. His first book was published in 1956, and by the time Trinidad achieved political independence in 1962, he had published four books and was firmly established as a writer in England. By the time Trinidad became a republic in 1976, Naipaul had written 13 books and had travelled through much of the postcolonial world. This book highlights how Trinidad and Naipaul were bound in a love-hate relationship where Naipaul continued to pass Trinidad off as a cynical island where “nothing was created” while Trinidad had its share by laying back a claim on him and his writing. It is generally perceived that Naipaul shunned his place of birth as he called his birth in Trinidad a “mistake,” Trinidad an “unimportant, uncreative, cynical” place and the Caribbean as the “Third World’s Third World.” His refusal to acknowledge Trinidad in his initial response to receiving the Nobel Prize added insult to injury. Yet, he was deeply bound to the island of Trinidad and his roots in the Indo-Trinidadian community. This book makes Naipaul’s connection to Trinidad more than evident and as such adds to the present body of knowledge.
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.
Longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Five people, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more. Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.
