V. S. Naipaul

On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power? Written in the politically turbulent 1970s, Guerrillas takes aim at the sacred cows and myths of revolutionaries-how so many of them huff and puff, knowing that the house will never blow down. From the safest places come the bravest words. Naipaul's bleak tale also takes aim at flaws in Marxist and revolutionary ideology-at the idea that one can predict or manipulate how the revolution will turn out. His characters are lost souls trying to navigate a postcolonial world where racism, classism, and conflicting ideals create a festering unrest that no one knows how to fix.

On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power? Written in the politically turbulent 1970s, Guerrillas takes aim at the sacred cows and myths of revolutionaries-how so many of them huff and puff, knowing that the house will never blow down. From the safest places come the bravest words. Naipaul's bleak tale also takes aim at flaws in Marxist and revolutionary ideology-at the idea that one can predict or manipulate how the revolution will turn out. His characters are lost souls trying to navigate a postcolonial world where racism, classism, and conflicting ideals create a festering unrest that no one knows how to fix.

The central novel from V. S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize-winning narrative of displacement, published for the first time in a stand-alone edition.‘In a Free State was conceived in 1969 as a sequence about displacement. There was to be a central novel, set in Africa, with shorter surrounding matter from other places. The shorter pieces from these varied places were intended to throw a universal light on the African material. But then, as the years passed and the world changed, and I felt myself less of an oddity as a writer, I grew to feel that the central novel was muffled and diminished by the surrounding material and I began to think that the novel should be published on its own. This is what, many years after its first publication, my publisher is doing in this edition.’ - V. S. Naipaul. In a Free State is set in Africa, in a place like Uganda or Rwanda, and its two main characters are English. They had once found liberation in Africa. But now Africa is going sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make a long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive – the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage – we know everything about the English characters, the African country, and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it.

V. S. Naipaul’s first travel book, The Middle Passage, takes us on a rich and emotional journey to a place of the greatest interest – his birthplace. In 1960, Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and the Caribbean societies of four adjacent countries, Guyana, Surinam, Martinique and Jamaica. Haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that it can scarcely comprehend its end, Naipaul catches this poor, topsy-turvy world at a critical moment, a time when racial and political assertion had yet to catch up – a perfect subject for the acute understanding and dazzling prose of this great writer. ‘Naipaul travels with the artist’s eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning.’ Evelyn Waugh ‘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

Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers 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 African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul’s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa. Focusing upon the theme of belief – though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account – Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, 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 this book. ‘The quality of Naipaul’s writing – simple, concise, engaging – rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul’s latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best’ Time

In V. S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds we follow Willie Chandran, a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. In his early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the encouragement of his sister – and his own listlessness – and joins an underground movement in India. But years of revolutionary campaigns and then prison convince him that the revolution ‘had nothing to do with what we were fighting for’, and he feels himself further than ever ‘from his own history’. When he returns to Britain where, thirty years before, his wanderings began, Willie encounters a country that has turned its back on its past and, like him, has become detached from its own history. He endures the indignities of a culture dissipated by reform and compromise until, in a moment of grotesque revelation – a tour de force of parodic savagery from our most visionary of writers – Willie comes to an understanding that might finally allow him to release his true self. ‘A radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time . . . Magic Seeds demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year’ Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph

The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers an impassioned and prescient travelogue of his journeys through his ancestral homeland. - "An intricate, splendid, and utterly memorable book." --The New York Times Book Review Arising out of Naipaul's lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than fifty years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society--the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces. This book represents Naipaul's last word on his homeland, complementing his two other India travelogues, An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization.

Sumuisena talvena kirjailija asettuu asumaan Englannin vanhimmalle maaseudulle, lähelle Stonehengeä. Täällä hän on poikkeus - ja samalla yksi monista muukalaisista muuttamassa maan historiaa. Saapumisen arvoits on monisyinen, viisas romaani ihmisistä muutoksen keskellä, lähtemisen, saapumisen, ja erilaisuuden kysymyksistä. Tässä omaelämänkerrallisessa romaanissa tiivistyy trinidadilaissyntyisen, Englannissa asuvan kirjailijan rikas kokemus elämästä, eri maista, kulttuureista ja ihmisistä.

Elämän kuva -romaanista tutun, identiteettiään etsivän Will Chandranin vuodet ovat virranneet suuria tunteita herättämättä. Nyt Willy on nelissäkymmenissä. Hän on eronnut vaimostaan ja asuu sisarensa luona Berliinissä. Sisar vakuuttaa, että sellainen ihminen on arvokas, joka on löytänyt oman taistelunsa ja pyrkii muuttamaan maailmaa. Willy päättää palata sinne mistä on lähtenytkin. Intian viidakossa toimii terroristeja, joiden taistelun alistettujen puolesta hän päättää ottaa omakseen. Vaikka todellisuus paljastuu toiseksi, Willy jää leiriin seitsemäksi vuodeksi. Lopulta Willy päätyy nuoruutensa Lontooseen, mutta sen dekadentit kirjailijapiirit näyttäytyvätkin nyt banaalin keskiluokkaisina. Silti odottamatta myös vauraan suurkaupungin maaperässä itää kapinan siemeniä. Intialais-karibialais-brittiläinen V. S. Naipaul (s. 1932) on palkittu Nobelilla vuonna 2001. Observer-lehden mukaan hän on suurin elossa oleva englanninkielinen prosaisti.

The Nobel Prize-winning author continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life." The most essential English-language novelist of our time." --New YorkHaving left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly hunted by police and spurned by the people he means to liberate. But this is only one stop in a quest for authenticity that takes in all the fanaticism and folly of the postmodern era. Moving with dreamlike swiftness from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of rural India to the glut and moral desolation of 1980s London, Magic Seeds is a novel of oracular power, dazzling in its economy and unblinking in its observations.

Eleven essays on reading, writing, and identity--which have been brought together for the first time--from the Nobel Prize-winning author. - "He brings to nonfiction] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought.... I can no longer imagine the world without Naipaul's writing." --Vivian Gornick, Los Angeles Times Book ReviewHere the subject is Naipaul's literary evolution: the books that delighted him as a child; the books he wrote as a young man; the omnipresent predicament of trying to master an essentially metropolitan, imperial art form as an Asian colonial from a New World plantation island. He assesses Joseph Conrad, the writer most frequently cited as his forebear, and, in his celebrated Nobel Lecture, "Two Worlds," traces the full arc of his own career. Literary Occasions is an indispensable addition to the Naipaul oeuvre, penetrating, elegant, and affecting.

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.

A series of personal encounters throughout Indira Gandhi's India clearly reveals the overwhelming problems and agonies of the nation torn by overpopulation, poverty, and dissent. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, the Nobel Prize-winning author produced his finest novel, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity. "A masterpiece." --Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.

An omnibus edition featuring three classic comic works by the Nobel Prize-winning author features The Suffrage of Elvira, about an eventful political campaign in rural Trinidad; Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, and A Flag on the Island, an entertaining anthology of short fiction. Original. 12,500 first printing.