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Essays: The Writer and the World

Essays: The Writer and the World

by VSNaipaul (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2003

    $3.29
Synopsis

This wonderful collection of essays by V.S. Naipul features pieces taken from his earlier books - The Overcrowded Barracoon, The Return of Eva Peron and Finding the Centre - and also includes several previously uncollected essays. Concentrating mainly on V.S. Naipaul's writings about India, the Americas, Africa and the Diaspora, it is a clear-eyed and magnificent introduction to the writer's extraordinary world.

'How few writers there are, if any, who share his sense of mission and moral authority, who have his willingness to learn and to travel and his miraculous gift of language. Is there no one who could persuade him to go on one last journey?' Observer

'As these essays lavishly demonstrate, he is a true citizen of the world, and he richly deserves the Nobel prize he was awarded last year' Scotland on Sunday

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 416
 Publisher: Picador
Published: 05 Sep 2003
ISBN 10: 0330411764
ISBN 13: 9780330411769
Book Overview: V.S. Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Media Reviews
The most splendid writer of English alive today. . . . He looks into the mad eye of history and does not blink. -- The Boston Globe
It is altogether tonic to have a writer such as V. S. Naipaul in our midst. . . . This volume is as good a place as any to discover why he is a figure of such consequence. --Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Review
Naipaul brings to the [nonfiction] genre an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought. . . . [His is] a way of thinking about the world that will compel our attention throughout his working life and well beyond. . . . I can no longer imagine the world without Naipaul's writing. --Vivian Gornick, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Perceptive . . . inspired, provocative. . . . Naipaul has succeeded in richly articulating a writer's engagement with and exploration of the world. - The San Diego Union-Tribune

A profound, bracing meditation on the legacy of the colonial world. . . . His writing [offers] the world through eyes possessed of a noble clarity. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A welcome and worthy volume. . . . Only Naipaul can take a dim view of so much and so many, yet keep that dimness fantastically illuminated. . . . His prose is often simultaneously a blunt instrument and a surgical one, equally freighted with broad dismissive statements and blood-lettingly dissective insight. - San Francisco Chronicle

The quality and credibility of Naipaul's words become apparent when you find yourself savoring [his] descriptions. . . . Once finished with the collection, the reader will never see the world through the same eyes again. - Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Witheringlyastute. . . . One of our finest living writers. . . . Naipaul's is a crystalline, no-nonsense style. . . . He gives you the real world. - The Weekly Standard

Naipaul is essential reading today for anyone interested in a dissection of the universal tension that exists now between the East and the West. . . . His scholarship is exhaustive, his intuition trustworthy, and his scrutiny is unwavering. - The Oregonian

Wonderfully insightful. . . . Few writers are as qualified for the present moment, and few writers are as needed. - The Orlando Sentinel

Naipaul forces the traveler to think. . . . [He is] ever curious, ever exact in his observations. - Austin American-Statesman

Splendid. . . . Elegant and understated. . . . Naipaul is insatiable in his pursuit of facts and brilliant in his analysis of them. - The Sunday Star-Ledger
Naipaul's essays . . . depict a chaotic world, torn by ethnic, religious and cultural antagonisms, but they also discover the humanity that unites us, and thereby provide the kind of reassurance that perhaps only literature affords. - San Jose Mercury News
Author Bio
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and most recently The Masque of Africa, and a collection of correspondence, Letters Between A Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.