The Enigma Of Arrival

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2011-04-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307744036

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The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2011-12-14
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9780307370501

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A Turn in the South by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

V. S. Naipaul’s first book about the United States is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the hidden life and culture of the American South — from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2012-03-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307370594

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Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Author : Karl Ove Knausgaard
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 600 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780345815569

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Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard Pdf

The fifth installment in the epic six-volume My Struggle cycle is here, highly anticipated by Karl Ove Knausgaard's dedicated fan club--and the first in the cycle to be published separately in Canada. The young Karl Ove moves to Bergen to attend the Writing Academy. It turns out to be a huge disappointment: he wants so much, knows so little, and achieves nothing. His contemporaries have their manuscripts accepted and make their debuts while he begins to feel the best he can do is to write about literature. With no apparent reason to feel hopeful, he continues his exploration of and love for books and reading. Gradually his writing changes; his relationship with the world around him changes too. This becomes a novel about new, strong friendships and a serious relationship that transforms him until the novel reaches the existential pivotal point: his father dies, Karl Ove makes his debut as a writer and everything disintegrates. He flees to Sweden, to avoid family and friends.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2011-11-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307269485

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A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

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.

Author : Dagmar Barnouw
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Cultural pluralism in literature
ISBN : 025321579X

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Naipaul's Strangers by Dagmar Barnouw Pdf

From his reporting on Islamic true believers to his descriptions of the postcolonial world, V. S. Naipaul has been a controversial figure in contemporary letters. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference--and the incompleteness and uncertainty of understanding "strangers." In this book, Dagmar Barnouw explores the sophisticated strategies and experimentations that Naipaul employs in his cultural critique and in his enterprise of learning about and documenting the enduring strangeness of this world.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2010-10-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307399977

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The Masque of Africa by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

Understanding Africa is critical for all concerned with the world today: in what promises to be his final great work of reportage, one of the keenest observers of the continent surveys the effects of belief and religion on the disparate peoples of Africa. The Masque of Africa is Nobel Prize-winning V. S. Naipaul's first major work of non-fiction to be published since his internationally bestselling Beyond Belief. Like all of Naipaul's great works of non-fiction, The Masque of Africa is superficially a book of travels — full of people, stories and landscapes he visits — but it also encompasses a larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (whether in indigenous animisms, faiths imposed by other cultures, or even the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307370617

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Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

To the residents of Miguel Street, a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital, their neighbourhood is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There’s Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build “the thing without a name;” Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion; Big Foot, the dreaded bully with glass tear ducts; and the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. Their lives (and the legends their neighbours construct around them) are rendered by V. S. Naipaul with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion in this tender, funny novel.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2011-03-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307789334

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The Loss of El Dorado by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

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.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2011-04-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307789310

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Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a novel of exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. “A brilliant novel in every way.… [It] shimmers with artistic certainty.” —The New York Times Book Review Set on a troubled Carribbean island, where “everybody wants to fight his own little war,” where “everyone is a guerrilla,” the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island – subdued now, almost withdrawn – to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed – excited – by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives.

Author : Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0140052593

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The Return of Eva Peron by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Pdf

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 595 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2011-03-23
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9780307789303

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Among the Believers by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

The Nobel Prize-winning author gives us – on the basis of his own intensive seventeen month journey across the Asian continent – an unprecedented revelation of the Islamic world. • “A brilliant report…. A book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events” (Newsweek). With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books and won him international acclaim (“There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him” – Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the ferment inside the nations of Islam – in a book that combines the fascinations of the great works of travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original, and idiosyncratic political mind. He takes us into four countries in the throes of “Islamization” – countries that, in their ardor to build new societies based entirely on the fundamental laws of Islam, have violently rejected the “materialism” of the technologically advanced nations that have long supported them. He brings us close to the people of Islam – how they live and work, the role of faith in their lives, how they see their place in the modern world.

Author : Alexis Wright
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2016-06-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781501124785

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The Swan Book by Alexis Wright Pdf

Originally published: Australia: Giramondo, 2013.

Author : Patrick French
Publisher : Viking Canada
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2008-08-12
Category : Authors, English
ISBN : 0670045292

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The World Is What It Is by Patrick French Pdf

Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul's childhood in Trinidad, Patrick French gives us the boy born to an Indian family who wins a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 17. London in the 1950s offers his first literary success, but homesickness almost defeats Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an English woman who will stand by him for 4 decades, even as he embarks on a 24-year love affair which will feed his dizzying creativity. Informed by exclusive access to the subject's private papers and personal recollections, French's revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.

Author : V. S. Naipaul
Publisher : Picador USA
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : Authors, Trinidadian
ISBN : 0330343963

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The Middle Passage by V. S. Naipaul Pdf

Naipul's first work of travel writing is an account of his journey in 1950 from London to his birthplace, Trinidad. He offers a record of his impressions there and elsewhere in the West Indies and South America, and examines their common heritage of colonialism and slavery.