V. S. Naipaul's Journeys
From Periphery to Center
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- $45.99
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- $45.99
Publisher Description
The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up in Trinidad in an Indian immigrant community, and his depiction of colonized peoples has often been harshly judged by critics as unsympathetic, misguided, racist, and sexist. Yet other readers praise his work as containing uncommonly perceptive historical and psychological insight.
In V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys, Sanjay Krishnan offers new perspectives on the distinctiveness and power of Naipaul’s writing, as well as his shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul’s life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have dominated discussions of his writing. Krishnan reads Naipaul as self-subverting and self-critical, engaged in describing his own implication in what he saw as the malaise of the postcolonial world. Krishnan brings together close readings of major novels with considerations of Naipaul’s work as a united project, as well as nuanced assessments of Naipaul’s political commentary on ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Krishnan provides a Naipaul for contemporary times, illustrating how his life and work shed light on debates regarding migration, diversity, sectarianism, displacement, and other global challenges.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krishnan (Reading the Global), an associate English professor at Boston University, devotes this insightful analysis to postcolonial themes in the work of the late novelist V.S. Naipaul (1932 2018). A divisive figure, Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, but was also described by detractors as a "troll," who would periodically "feed the media with soundbites... calculated to provoke outrage," such as disparaging comments about India, from which his grandparents had emigrated. Krishnan does not attempt to explain away the troublesome aspects of Naipaul's worldview, but instead understand how Naipaul's experiences with racial tensions while growing up in Trinidad's Indian immigrant community informed his writing. Krishnan quotes Naipaul as writing in The Enigma of Arrival, "My subject was not my sensibility... but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in." Krishnan offers nuanced and careful readings of Naipaul's major works, with a particular focus on Naipaul's 1979 Africa-set masterpiece, A Bend in the River. Krishnan sees it as a chronicle of postcolonial pragmatism in which the protagonist, Salim, much like Naipaul, incorporates the West's view of other cultures as "exotic" and inferior into his own worldview as a way to deal with and manipulate dominant Western cultures. Krishnan's jargon-free study will prove invaluable to serious readers and Naipaul scholars alike.