A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

by V.S. Naipaul (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $3.30

  Over the course of his astonishing fifty-year career, V.S. Naipaul's writing has been characterized by a commitment to truth that gives his work a unique luminosity and brilliance. In A Writer's People he brings unmatched clarity and rich experience to an exploration of the ways we think, see and feel.

  The range of this extraordinary book reflects an intellect deeply engaged with the challenges of assimilation faced by the `serious traveller', one for whom there can be no single world view. Naipaul writes about the classical world - what we have retained from it, what we have forgotten - and the more recent past. Figures as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Derek Walcott and Gustave Flaubert come under his compassionate scrutiny, as do his own early years in Trinidad, the silences in his family history and the roles played by Anthony Powell and Francis Wyndham in his first encounters with literary culture.

  Part meditation, part remembrance, as elegant as it is revelatory, A Writer's People is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers.

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $4.96

  'My purpose is not literary criticism or biography. I wish only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which I was exposed.' For the 'serious traveller', one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul's own father), to which is added the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world). There is 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. Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer's People is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers. 'The greatest writer now living in Britain. His courage in seeing and telling the truth represents a level of high seriousness that has all but vanished' Sunday Times 'Essential reading ...it offers the insights and observations on literature, history and cultural sensibility of an honest and truly global thinker' Evening Standard