A Writer's People
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers an eloquent, candid, wide-ranging narrative that delves into the sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation.
“Bracing, surprising.... A meditation on art and life.” —The New York Review of Books
V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of "fitting one civilization to another." In A Writer's People, he takes us into this process that has shaped both his writing and his life.
Naipaul discusses the writers to whom he was exposed early on—Derek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert, and his father, among them—and his first encounters with literary culture. He illuminates the ways in which the writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian writers both reveal and conceal the authors themselves and their nation. And he brings the same scrutiny to bear on his own life: his early years in Trinidad; the empty spaces in his family history; his ever-evolving reactions to the more complicated India he would encounter for the first time at age thirty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fascinating but not fully satisfying new book by Nobel prize-winner Naipaul is a curious collection. These five nonfiction pieces have no thematic through-line or argument, wandering instead through pockets of memoir, literary criticism, history and gossip. Naipaul is well-versed for this type of journey, as his past forays into fiction, travel writing and autobiography have proven, and his ability to thoroughly engage with both the stylistic flaws of Flaubert's novel Salammb and an early biography of Gandhi within the space of a few pages is both illuminating and impressive. One of the loose organizing themes of the book is Naipaul's relationships with other writers and books, a subject on which he expounds fully and often with more than a touch of spite. In "An English Way of Looking," on the British writer Anthony Powell, a good friend during Naipaul's early years in London, Naipaul criticizes Powell's writing unrelentingly, then paints extraordinarily unflattering portraits of Auberon Waugh and Phillip Larkin as punishment for their criticism of Powell. Nonetheless, Naipaul's latest offers an honest portrait of a major international writer's perspective from late in life.
