Non-Fiction Books
From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a classic of modern travel writing—a deft portrait of Trinidad and the four adjacent Caribbean societies still haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism. “Belongs in the same category of travel writing as Lawrence’s books on Italy, Greene’s on West Africa and Pritchett’s on Spain.” — New Statesman In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart’s appearance with cries of “That is man!” He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France’s routes nationales. And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region’s colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.
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
In this masterpiece about Trinidad, the Nobel Prize-winning author has “given us a lesson in history [and] shown us how it is best written” ( The New York Times ). The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul—himself a native of Trinidad—shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries. Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony, where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic, near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or poison, of African sorcery and revolt. Naipaul tells this labyrinthine story with assurance, withering irony, and lively sympathy. The result is historical writing at its highest level.
Con il suo inconfondibile tocco, Naipaul ricostruisce tre esemplari parabole umane che si traducono in altrettante variazioni sul potere in tutti i suoi toni, dal tragico al grottesco. La figura di Mobutu, dominus del Congo/Zaire, è un condensato di dissimulazione ideologica, con la sua capacità di perpetuare le leggi dispotiche del colonialismo belga sotto una sorta di «socialismo africano ancestrale» e di spacciare per «rivoluzione» maoista l’esercizio crudele della regalità. Michael de Freitas alias Michael X, sedicente attivista per i diritti civili, finito sulla forca per aver massacrato alcuni affiliati a Trinidad, è uno dei tanti riverberi farseschi dell’Africa della diaspora: un «uomo del Black Power senza potere e senza la pelle nera», che si impone come mito underground solo nell’Inghilterra «provinciale, ricca e sicura» in cui ha trascorso la giovinezza come pusher e magnaccia. La vicenda del regime peronista ha il suo contrappunto nella passione del popolo per Evita, aspirante attrice emersa dalla «cittadina più tetra della pampa», e predestinata a eternare i suoi tratti fantasmatici e sensuali nella fissità dell’imbalsamazione, dopo la morte ad appena trentatré anni. E cornice ideale del trittico è il magistrale saggio su Joseph Conrad, vero corpo a corpo critico con lo scrittore che più di ogni altro ha segnato Naipaul, dove il personaggio chiave di Cuore di tenebra diventa la sintesi archetipica delle tre parabole che abbiamo attraversato.
This diary served as the basis of Naipaul's masterpiece, A Bend in the River, which is the story of an Indian, uprooted by war, who has come to live in an isolated town along a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us a most convincing and disturbing view of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
"Among the Believers" is V. S. Naipaul's classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia; 'the believers' are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world. It is a uniquely valuable insight into modern Islam, and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism. 'The edgy exactitude of Naipaul's writing is both effortlessly classical and yet at the same time brilliantly contemporary, as sharp and lucid as a spear of glass...He is inimitable, truly great and truly deserving of the Nobel' - "Observer".
"A Turn in the South" is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers, ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things ...a fine book by a fine man, and one to be read with great enjoyment: a book of style, sagacity and wit' - "Sunday Times". 'A tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' - "New York Times Review of Books".
The Nobel Prize-winning author offers an insightful follow-up to his landmark travelogue Among the Believers : a "brilliant … powerfully observed, stylistically elegant exploration" ( The New York Times ) that’s the result of a five-month journey through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia, countries where dreams of Islamic purity clash with economic and political realities. Fourteen years after the publication of his landmark travel narrative Among the Believers , V. S. Naipaul returned to the four non-Arab Islamic countries he reported on so vividly at the time of Ayatollah Khomeini's triumph in Iran. Beyond Belief is the result of his five-month journey in 1995 through lands where descendants of Muslim converts live at odds with indigenous traditions. In extended conversations with a vast number of people—a rare survivor of the martyr brigades of the Iran-Iraq war, a young intellectual training as a Marxist guerilla in Baluchistan, an impoverished elderly couple in Teheran whose dusty Baccarat chandeliers preserve the memory of vanished wealth, and countless others—V. S. Naipaul deliberately effaces himself to let the voices of his subjects come through. Yet the result is a collection of stories that has the author's unmistakable stamp. With its incisive observation and brilliant cultural analysis, Beyond Belief is a startling and revelatory addition to the Naipaul canon.
An “extraordinary rich correspondence” ( The New York Times Book Review ) between a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer at Oxford who would go on to become a Nobel Prize winning author and his sacrificing, beloved father. At seventeen, V.S. Naipaul wanted to "follow no other profession" but writing. Awarded a scholarship by the Trinidadian government, he set out to attend Oxford, where he encountered a vastly different world from the one he yearned to leave behind. Separated from his family by continents, and grappling with depression, financial strain, loneliness, and dislocation, "Vido" bridged the distance with a faithful correspondence that began shortly before the young man's two-week journey to England and ended soon after his father's death four years later. Here, for the first time, we have the opportunity to read this profoundly moving correspondence, which illuminates with unalloyed candor the relationship between a sacrificing father and his determined son as they encourage each other to persevere with their writing. For though his father's literary aspirations would go unrealized, Naipaul's triumphant career would ultimately vindicate his beloved mentor's legacy.
Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by the Nobel Prize-winning author. “The most splendid writer…. He looks into the mad eye of history and does not blink.” — The Boston Globe V.S. Naipaul is our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In these pages, he trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of both the real and mythical past. Whether he is writing about a string of racial murders in Trinidad; the mad, corrupt reign of Mobutu in Zaire; Argentina under the generals; or Dallas during the 1984 Republican Convention, Naipaul combines intellectual playfulness with sorrow, indignation, and analysis so far-reaching that it approaches prophecy. The Writer and the World reminds us that he is in a class by himself.
Born in Trinidad of Indian descent, a resident of England for his entire adult life, and a prodigious traveler, Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of “fitting one civilisation to another.” Here, in his first book of nonfiction since 2003, he gives us an eloquent, candid, wide-ranging narrative that delves into this sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation. He discusses the writers he read early on: Derek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert and his own father among them. He explains how Anthony Powell and Francis Wyndham influenced his first encounters with literary culture. He looks at what we have retained—and forgotten—of the world portrayed in Caesar’s The Gallic War and Virgil’s Aeneid . He illuminates the ways in which the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian writers both reveal and conceal the authors and their nation. And he brings the same scrutiny to bear on his own life: his years in Trinidad; the gaps in his family history; the “private India” kept alive in his family through story, ritual, religion and culture; his ever-evolving reaction to the more complicated and demanding true India he would encounter for the first time when he was thirty. Part meditation, part remembrance, as elegant as it is revelatory, A Writer’s People allows us privileged insight—full of incident, humor and feeling—into the mind of one of our greatest writers.
Like all of V. S. Naipaul’s “travel” books, The Masque of Africa encompasses a much larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization. From V. S. Naipaul: “For my travel books I travel on a theme. And the theme of The Masque of Africa is African belief. I begin in Uganda, at the center of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economical life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account. “Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world. The theme held until I got to the South, when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg didn’t rest on sand. The older world of magic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt that it would survive any calamity. “I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn’t. The diviners everywhere wanted to ‘throw the bones’ to read the future, and the idea of ‘energy’ remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts. In South Africa body parts, mainly of animals, but also of men and women, made a mixture of ‘battle medicine.’ To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. “To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book.” The Masque of Africa is a masterly achievement by one of the world’s keenest observers and one of its greatest writers.
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