Way In The World - Hardcover

Naipaul, V.S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0434510297 ISBN 13: 9780434510290

Publisher: Random House UK, 1997

Synopsis

A crisp clean hardcover, no markings throughout:\n\nBilled by the publisher as Naipaul's first novel since The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, this can really be regarded as fiction only by the most extremely elastic definition. It is in fact a series of extended essays, meditations and dramatized historical reconstructions that originally carried the perhaps more fitting subtitle ``A Sequence.'' Naipaul ruminates, with all his acute intelligence, on how history shapes personality--and vice versa. The book begins and ends with unexpectedly personal autobiographical sketches of Naipaul: as a boy in Trinidad; as a bright young clerk with a scholarship and a future; as a fledgling writer struggling in London; and, finally, in a later period, in an unnamed East African country where he reencounters a character from his youth. These flank two much longer pieces, which are both poignant and superbly realized portraits of elderly figures whose once-powerful lives were wrecked, more than 200 years apart, by their efforts to exploit, economically and politically, the corner of South America where Trinidad looks across the Bay of Paria to the swampy mainland of Venezuela. Sir Walter Raleigh came twice, with dreams of gold fathered by Columbus, and is seen on his last voyage, about to return to death in the Tower. Francisco Miranda, an astonishing, courtly con man who used, and was used by, both British and Spanish governments as a would-be ``liberator'' of Latin America in the late 18th century, is seen in fragile Trinidadian exile, exchanging thoughtful, chatty letters with his wife in London. Naipaul's mastery of his material is absolute, and his seemingly effortless, beautifully wrought prose carries the reader to the heart of the mysteries of human destiny.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul, "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian . . . a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."--New York Times.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0434510297
• ISBN 13: 9780434510290
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256