The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: and Other Comic Inventions

Naipaul, Sir V. S.

ISBN 10: 0330523708 / ISBN 13: 9780330523707

Published by Picador, 2011

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned. Seller Inventory # wbs3864024269

Synopsis:

With a preface by the author.

V. S. Naipaul’s legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction – two novels and a collection of stories – that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humour.

The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul’s hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates’ tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion is an ageing Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and an unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad – whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name – to a rooming house in London, where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars. Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language.

‘V. S. Naipaul has a substantial claim as a comic writer . . . This humour, conducted throughout with the utmost stylistic quietude, is completely original’ Kingsley Amis, Spectator

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 twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and most recently The Masque of Africa, and a collection of correspondence, Letters Between a Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: and ...
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: 2011
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good